The Big Con
by William Easley
Summary: After "The Woman with the Cipher Tattoo," Dipper and Mabel are ready to relax. Then a retired Admiral calls and asks for their help. He has a ghost problem - or so he claims. In their second investigation during their second summer in Gravity Falls, the Mystery Twins run into a riddle of unsuspected dimensions. A little Wendip, but no serious shipping.
1. Chapter 1

**The Big Con**

 **Chapter 1: Who's he Gonna Call?**

 **From the Journals of Dipper Pines**

 _Saturday, June 29:_ Mabel woke me up this morning at seven-forty. Even though we're not sharing the attic any longer, I think she's going to be coming up here all the time. This morning she bounded in because she wanted to show me her newest sweater, which she's almost finished. It's kind of a . . . yellowy-greeny, I guess?

She tells me it is "chartreuse," and I had to look up how to spell that. Anyway, on the chest the sweater, which is about the size of a circus tent, has a, what, embroidery—is that the right word?—no, Mabel says "appliqué"—of the maroon-colored fez Grunkle Stan always wore until he turned it and the management of the Mystery Shack over to Soos.

"Do you think Soos will like it?" Mabel asked, bouncing up and down on her old bed.

"Mabel," I told her, "I can't think of anything Soos _doesn't_ like."

She looked thoughtful, rolling her eyes up to the ceiling and sticking her tongue partway out of the corner of her mouth the way she does. "Ummm. The taste of fish food," she reminded me brightly. She bugged her eyes and stuck out her tongue about a foot. "Blarrrrgghh!"

I remembered how Soos had frantically tried to scrub the taste off his tongue with both hands, and Mabel imitated that, too. It was a pretty funny impression.

"Heh. Yeah, that was one thing, I guess."

Mabel said she'd finish the sweater in time for it to be a Fourth of July present. I didn't point out that the Fourth of July is not usually a time when people eagerly look forward to receiving sweaters as presents.

Anyway, she left the nearly-finished knitting up on her old bed, and then we went down and had some juice and cereal for breakfast. After that we got our putters and a couple of golf balls (the inanimate kind—though the Lilliputtians helped us during Weirdmageddon, we don't really trust them enough to go back to the mini-golf course in town) and for an hour or so we practiced on the side lawn, where with Soo's permission we've trimmed the grass short and sunk three plastic drinking cups, bottoms punctured for drainage, into the ground to serve as golf holes. Each one has three approaches, and we've used old flower pots, boards, and other junk to construct obstacle courses, so it was like having nine miniature-golf holes in all.

I have to say we had a pretty good time goofing around. It was a nice morning, the sun just up over the eastern bluffs, the day warm but not yet hot, and the air all around smelling of fresh, growing things after last week's rain.

"I'm really rusty," Mabel complained when she missed a twenty-foot putt through a broken flower pot, up a ramp, and past zig-zagged bricks—by an inch, if that. "I gotta get back into champion condition!" She raised the putter over her head and pumped it up and down while marching in place and chanting "Cham-pi-ON! Cham-pi-ON!" Then I took my shot, which bounced off the flower pot, and grimaced as she laughed while poking me with both index fingers. "You missed by a _mile_ , broseph!"

"'Cause you were yelling in my ear," I told her. "You're such a loudmouth!"

"What? Avast! Nobody says that to your sister and lives! En garde!"

So with putters as swords, we dueled around the side yard for a little while. Then when we broke a sweat, we went into the shade at the edge of the woods and sat side by side on the bonfire log. "Have a good time at the dance last night?" I asked her.

She leaned back, kicking her feet, and shrugged. "Meh. I danced with a couple guys, but there was no zing, you know? Zing! You danced like _twice_ with Wendy." She nudged me coyly. "Didja smooch afterward?" She made little smacky, smoochy sounds with her lips.

"Well . . . kind of, in a friendly way, but not seriously," I said. "I also danced with Pacifica, but you probably didn't notice. You were way on the other side of the lawn with some tall geeky-looking guy, so . . . ."

Mabel gave her gurgling "Ha!" laugh and said, "At least Bronson didn't step on my toes the way DeWayne did in the first dance. Well, I guess I don't have to ask how _your_ dance went! Pacifica! Ha!"

Trying to sound way casual, I replied, "It didn't go all that bad, actually. Turns out she must really like me. She proposed to me."

Mabel's eyes got really round, and she jumped up off the log. " _Whaaat?_ No! Freakin'! Way!"

With a modest smile, I said, "Yeah, as soon as we're old enough she wants to make me a rich man and be my wife. I'm thinking it over—"

She wrestled me down, pinned me on the grass, and gave me hard noogies until I said, "Stop, stop! I give! It's not true! I was just kidding! We said we'd just be friends." I rolled away from her and lay on my back, panting. "And she wants us both to hang out with her sometimes, she says."

Mabel sat back on her knees. "Friends? Well—I don't _hate_ her. I mean, she can be pretty fun when she's not being all la-de-dah, look at me, I'm Pacifica." Her voice dropped to that rare soft tone when she's decided to be serious for two minutes. "You know, Candy tells me that since Pacifica's parents lost a lot of their money her old crew has dropped her and doesn't hang with her any longer. That's mean. I guess maybe Pacifica might be—lonely?"

"Maybe," I said, flicking about three dozen scurrying reddish-brown ants off my arms. "Did you have to hold me down over an anthill?" I stood up and started slapping more of the skittering critters off my shirt and legs.

"Yes. Yes, I definitely did," she said firmly. "Hey, look, here comes Wendy! Is it nine o'clock already?"

It was, just barely. Wendy parked her beat-up old green car in the lot, sauntered over with her lunch bag in hand, and asked, "How's it hangin', dudes? You squared away, Mabel?"

"Yup," Mabel said. "I feel like my old self again."

"Unfortunately," I added, trying to scratch an ant bite that was actually under the leg of my shorts.

Mabel punched me.

Wendy chuckled. "All right! I'm gonna put my stuff away and get to work, guys. Later!"

"I think I'll go in, too," I said, starting to follow her.

Mabel caught up with me. "Ooh, you want to whisper in Wendy's ear? _Wendy, I wuv 'oo!_ "

"No! No. If you really want to know, I need to take a hot shower and get these darned ants off me."

"Ha!" Mabel said. "That was my plan all along! To use my minions the ants to force you to shower!"

I actually don't know why she rags on me like that. I take a shower whenever I need one. And ever since that day last winter when Mabel set fire to everything in my laundry hamper—well, to be fair, she hauled the pile out to the incinerator first—I HAVE been trying to wash my clothes a little more often than I used to do.

"That should be _myrmidons_ , not _minions_ ," I told her.

"Huh?"

"Look it up," I told her on my way to the bathroom.

I lost count of the number of little red ants that I sent spinning down the drain. The warm water felt good on the bites, too, and I took a pretty long shower. Then, after I had just dried off and had pulled on my shorts, pants, and shirt, but not yet my vest or socks, I heard Wendy calling from downstairs: "Hey, Dipper! Phone for you!"

Huh? My cell phone was in the attic, on the little table beside my bed, plugged in and charging. Somebody called me at the Shack number? Besides Mom and Dad, who could it be? I hurried downstairs still barefoot and Wendy said into the receiver, "Here he is now."

She handed the phone to me, and when I raised my eyebrows in silent question, she gave a _who knows?_ kind of shrug. "Hello," I said, probably sounding a little uncertain. "This is Dipper Pines."

The voice on the other end sounded like an elderly and cranky bulldog that had been taught not just how to speak, but how to talk: "You the young feller that chases ghosts?"

I started to get the old tingly feeling that I get when a new mystery is breaking wide open. "Uh—well, I have chased one or two, yes."

"You broke up a serious haunting, and you, oh, what's the word for it, _exorcised_ a ghost for Mr. Northwest last summer? A tough ghost?"

"Yeah, he was pretty tough. But to be fair, I didn't do it on my own. I had some help."

"'Course a captain needs a crew! Stands to reason. You can use help here, too, Mr. Pines, if you want, long as you can get the job done. What are your fees?"

"I—don't really have any, sir. This is kind of my hobby. It would be free. I'd do it as a favor."

"Price is right, anyway!" I thought he was choking to death until I realized he was only chuckling. "Leave it at this: If you do me this favor, then I'll owe you one in return. Well, well, you sound like the boy for the job, all right. My name's Skipper. Admiral D.D. Skipper, US Navy, Retired. Mr. Northwest said I couldn't do better than call you. Son, I live a few miles outside Gravity Falls, and it seems I have a little ghost problem here . . . ."

And so it began.


	2. Chapter 2

**The Big Con**

 **Chapter 2: Of Ghosts and Goblins**

* * *

Dipper borrowed a pen and pad from behind the counter and wrote down the Admiral's name and address. "Tonight? Uh, sure," he said. "I'll try my best. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. I'll bring everything that I need. And everyone. Dinner? Uh, sure. Seven? OK, I'll find a way to get there. Yes—" he felt a little silly. "He hung up," Dipper explained to Wendy, replacing the receiver.

"What's goin' on, man?" Wendy asked. "Sounds all woo-ooo-ooo." She wriggled her fingers and grinned. "This another mission, dude?"

"Maybe," Dipper said. He quickly explained about Admiral D.D. Skipper and showed Wendy the address. "He wants us there at seven, and he's asking us to stay at least until midnight. He claims a ghost almost always shows up then."

"No way!" Wendy said. She glanced at what he'd written. "Oh, man, this is like 'way out. Almost out of the valley. Twelve miles at least, Dipper. You're not gonna ride your bike that far in the dark. Too many creatures out on these lonely roads at night."

"I guess I could call Grunkle Stan and ask if he could drive us. Or maybe Grunkle Ford would be better—though he'd take over the investigation."

"Chill, dude, I got your back," Wendy said. "Hey, this is Saturday. My dad and my brothers always go bowling over in Roseburg and never get back before, like, daybreak. If I can tag along, I'll drive you guys over. I always enjoy these mystery missions of yours."

"Great," Dipper said.

"No sweat, Dip. I gotta tell you, though—after the convenience store, I'm not too stoked about ghosts. This one isn't gonna put us through the mill again, is it?"

"I don't think so," he told her. "I'm gonna read up on them, but I don't think this one is a Cat 10 or anywhere close to it. It seems to be a reproaching spirit, not a vengeful one."

"Dude, you like totally lost me. Uh, oh, here comes a caravan! 'Scuse me, Dip, gotta get busy. Talk to you later!"

Six vehicles—three cars, a van, a pickup truck, and a school bus that looked as if it had been converted into a camper against its will, all with California plates, had jounced into the lot, and from them spilled a crowd of people who looked so much alike—fat, dozy-eyed, and moseying—that you just knew this had to be a family reunion.

So it proved, for the first four people in, a granny and gramps, a middle-aged woman, and a toddler about four, all wore T-shirts that proclaimed them members of the O'Doniphon Family. Soos, rather natty in black suit and bow tie, came in to welcome them and escort them on the museum tour—twenty bucks a head, babies and tots up to four free, and "Conjoined twins half price each, dudes."

It was corny, but it got a laugh from the tourists. There were about twenty-five of them, only five of them under four, and all but three of the rest paid the entrance fee not just dutifully but eagerly. "I'm Mr. Mystery!" Soos proclaimed. "Follow me into a world of enchantment and wonder!" He threw open a door, walked in, immediately walked out again and said, "Broom closet, dawgs. Next door."

Dipper groaned a little. Soos pulled the same stunt on each tour, and it always got a laugh. But seeing the big guy enjoy himself so much made Dipper chuckle a little, too. As the remaining O'Doniphons began to browse the shop, a tour bus pulled up. Knowing Wendy wasn't going to have time to talk for at least an hour, Dipper climbed the stair up to the attic, pulled out his set of Journals (yeah, yeah, they had been incinerated, but Mabel and Dipper did a favor for Blendin Blandin, the time traveler, who found a clever way to duplicate the originals, yatta yatta, there's a story about it somewhere).

Most of the material on ghosts was in Volume Three, but the first two had some good pointers on tracking down things like sprites and sidhes, independent vapors and Jamaican duppies (they roll along deserted roads and travelers can tell when one passes because they feel a blast of heat), Indonesian penanggalans, sort of zombie-like except their heads can detach and fly around, looking for victims whose blood the ghost drinks. The sketch of one of these was pretty terrible, since not only the head flies—the creature's stomach and guts trail along under the head, drippy and oozy and supposedly cold to the touch. There was the Inuit Wendigo, a ghost as thin as a sheet of paper—you could only see it if it was facing you, because edge-on there wasn't enough of it to perceive.

Reading thoughtfully and clicking his pen—an old habit—Dipper made mental notes but wrote nothing down. He didn't have enough information to form any theories. But maybe at midnight—just possibly . . . .

"Hiyo!" The bellowed word came so unexpectedly that Dipper, who had dozed over the Journals, yipped and fell backward in his chair. Mabel, of course, just coming by to see what was up. She helped Dipper get back upright, scanned the back of his head and said that outside of a lump there was nothing wrong.

"Maybe," Dipper growled, "but it's the inside of the lump that hurts. Hey, you want to go on a mystery mission with Wendy and me tonight?"

"You're sure I won't be in the way?" Mabel said, teasingly. "Oh, Dipper, I'm so scared! Hold me tight! Here, Wendy, I got you. I'll kiss you to still your fears. Mm, mmm, mmm-mmm!"

Dipper swatted her with a pillow. "Hey, Sis, if that was gonna happen, I would definitely not invite you!"

"Okay, I was kidding," Mabel said. "So I'll pack my grappling hook—and I want to bring Waddles!"

"I can't think of a thing that Waddles could contribute."

"He has a keen analytic mind," Mabel pointed out.

"Well, right now he's analyzing yesterday's undershorts by chewing on them!"

"Come on, Waddles," Mabel coaxed, pulling the pig from beneath Dipper's bed, although since the previous summer Waddles had porked up so much that he could no longer get all the way under. "C'mon, Dip, you know Waddles wants to get re-acquainted with his old home town."

"It's fine with me," Dipper said. "As long as Wendy doesn't mind him riding in her car."

As it turned out, Wendy had no particular problem. "Hey, some of the boys I've been in cars with, he can only be an improvement, believe me. You buckled in, Mabes? Here, hold him tight."

Because the old Dodge Dart was currently lacking a back seat, they all had to squeeze in the front. Mabel was first in, and when Waddles clambered up beside her, she said, "On my lap, little fella!"

And then she said, "Wah! Whoa! Off my lap, off, off, off, off! You're crushing me!"

"Face it, dude," Wendy said, "Waddles is no longer a lap pig. He must weigh, like, a hundred pounds by now!"

"Considering everything," Mabel said after she had urged Waddles out of the car—he seemed just as happy outside as inside, really—"I think his role is to remain here at headquarters and coordinate any intel we send back."

Waddles grunted.

"See? He agrees with me!" Mabel said. "Dipper, get in quick and let's go before he climbs aboard again and starts to eat the upholstery."

They left him happily ambling around the parking lot, nosing up little fragments of food dropped by the many tourists who'd passed through that day. It was a little after six when they left the Shack.

Wendy drove more conservatively with Dipper and Mabel aboard, and it took close to twenty-five minutes to go twelve miles and a bit. "It's outside the weirdness bubble," Dipper said as they crossed an old bridge over the river.

"So this Admiral guy didn't get trapped in Weirdmageddon," Wendy said. "Bummer. Anybody who wasn't inside the bubble didn't know Gravity Falls was, like, wiped off the face of the map for—how long did that last, anyway?"

"Seemed like a week," Mabel said. "I was in my bubble for at least that long."

"Yeah, but when it all ended, remember we found out it was still a week until our birthday. Bill had frozen time or something," Dipper said.

"Well, ya know what they say, dude," Wendy replied.

They all chorused, "Never mind all that!"

Then they rounded a bend and Wendy said, "Oh, man! I never paid any attention to that place. That the address?"

"That's it," Dipper said, staring out the passenger window.

It was a rambling house behind a high brick fence. He couldn't see much of it, but from what he could see—

"That's just the place to have a ghost," he muttered.

Maybe even a Category Ten.


	3. Chapter 3

**The Big Con**

 **Chapter 3: The Ghost Walks**

"Geeze," Wendy muttered as she turned in at the long drive. "This is like seriously messed up, guys." The fence around the house and grounds must have been ten feet high, brick but painted gleaming white. Ahead a gate made of thick wrought-iron spikes barred the way—but as the old car nosed forward, the gate swung open on silent hinges, as if opened by an invisible hand.

"Wah-wah-wowie," Mabel said as the car pulled through the opening. "He's got _toys_!"

He did indeed. The broad front lawn was like a military museum: a howitzer and an anti-aircraft gun flanked the entrance. A World War II-era PT boat, looking brand-new in sharp paint, rested on dry-dock stocks on the right; an M-24 Chaffee tank hulked on the left. A Jeep. An armored personnel carrier. An LST. Even a T-6 airplane, a trainer decked out in Navy colors, sat as though ready for takeoff. Beyond them, a few steps from the main door of the house, stood a fifty-foot flagpole, with Old Glory at the top and below it the dark-blue and yellow US Navy flag.

The driveway turned into a circle –the flagpole was in the center of the circle, in a grassy plot—and from it a smaller drive led to the left, where a three-door garage squatted. Wendy just parked near the front door, and they climbed out.

Dipper turned and saw that someone had already opened the door—a skinny old guy in a dress-white Navy uniform stood beside it at attention. They walked over, Dipper wondering if he should salute. "Uh—Admiral?" he asked.

"No, sonny," the old guy said. "Chief Petty Officer Dogget. The admiral will meet you at dinner. It's time to lower the flags for the night. Would you help me?"

"Uh . . . sure," Dipper said.

"You young ladies stand there. You know how to behave?"

Wendy nudged Mabel and said, "We do."

"Good." Dogget stepped to the door and pressed the doorbell three quick times in succession. From a speaker hidden in the shrubbery came the sound of "Attention" being played on a trumpet. Dogget and Wendy simultaneously threw back their shoulders and saluted the flag, and after only a half-second of hesitation, Dipper and Mabel did the same. When the trumpet call changed to "Retreat," Dogget broke the salute and began to lower the flags. Wendy held the salute, and so Dipper did too.

The trumpet call ended as Dogget began to release the Navy flag. Dipper stepped up and helped fold it, and then they did the same for the national flag. Dogget nodded without smiling. "Good job. Thank you."

He led them inside, paused to place the flags in a glass-fronted cabinet, and then led them down a hall carpeted in plush maroon until he indicated an open doorway to the left. "Wait here. The Admiral will meet you at seven bells."

He ushered them into a sitting room that looked as if it had been designed for department-store mannequins, not humans. Two sofas faced each other across a round coffee table on which a model ship rested. A chair was centered against three of the four walls; two more flanked the hall door. A row of paintings and photographs completely encircled the room, skipping only the two front windows and the two side windows. Every one of them showed a sailing vessel, some of them on peaceful seas, some fighting storms, and more with guns blazing in action.

"Sit there," Dogget said, indicating one of the sofas—upholstered in Navy blue, like the chairs and the other sofa. "I'll call you to dinner in twelve minutes."

 _Oh_ , thought Dipper. _Two bells is seven o'clock._

"This dude is seriously into ships," Wendy said, her voice almost a whisper.

"I'll bet the ghost is a sailor," Mabel said.

"Don't speculate," Dipper cautioned. "We have no data to go on."

"Dipper!" Mabel scolded. "You've been hanging around with Grunkle Ford too long!"

Wendy had leaned forward to inspect the model ship on the coffee table. It was the _USS Sabine Pass,_ a slim gray vessel with a squared-off stern, an array of radar domes on the superstructure, and a helicopter landing pad on the quarterdeck. "This isn't out of a box, dudes," she said. "I think it's like, hand-crafted."

"It's a cruiser," Dipper said. " _Ticonderoga_ class, I think." He pointed across the room to the oil painting that hung beside the doorway. "I know that's the _USS Constitution._ That's probably her fight with the British warship _HMS Guerriere._ "

Two bells clanged, and the same sharp, querulous voice he had heard on the phone said, "Right, Mr. Pines! A famous triumph for the US Navy."

The figure that stood in the doorway hardly matched the hard voice: a square-built man, not as tall as Wendy, with sparse white hair on a pink scalp, an ugly face on a head that looked almost like it had been carved, badly, from a cube of wood, and a heavyset body in Naval dress whites. "I am Rear Admiral D.D. Skipper, US Navy, Retired, ladies and gentleman. Come with me. I told Dogget to see to the wardroom." He crooked his arm and Wendy slid her own arm through, glancing at Dipper and rolling her eyes.

The "wardroom" was a dining room a few steps down the hall. Dogget led Wendy to a chair on the right of a long table; he placed Mabel to the left, and Dipper next to her; and he took his seat at the head. The table had been set with gleaming white china edged in silver, crystal glasses, and more silverware than Dipper could identify.

"Now, then," the Admiral said briskly, "before we begin, introductions are in order. Mr. Pines, will you do the honors?"

"Uh, sure, sir. This is Wendy Corduroy. She's a good friend of ours. This is my sister Mabel, and me you know. I mean, we spoke on the phone. I'm Dipper Pines. Uh, I'm talking too much."

"Very pleased to have you all aboard," the Admiral said. His face turned a shade of purple, and he shook his head, making his jowls wobble. "Since this ghost business cropped up, got out of the habit of entertaining." His blue eyes almost popped. "I mean, you're having a nice sit-down dinner, everybody's chatting, and then this ghost comes gliding through the walls and passes right down the center of the table, making faces and leering! Very unmilitary. Oh, here's Dogget."

The Chief Petty Officer had wheeled in a cart with covered plates. He served them all, finishing with the Admiral, and then uncovered the dishes. Dipper had expected fish—that would have gone with the house—but instead he saw on his plate a small steak, mashed potatoes, glazed carrots, and a compact little salad of greens, tiny tomatoes, and olives.

"Thank you, Dogget," the Admiral said. "Well, I can say truthfully that Mr. Dogget was the best cook I ever sailed with. Dig in!"

It was all tasty, even the salad—which surprised Dipper, because he didn't much care for salads. Mabel, of course, inhaled everything, including four of the rolls that Dogget put on the table in a silver basket. Dessert was ice cream—vanilla with chocolate-mint bits sprinkled in. "Home-made," the Admiral said.

Mabel had seconds, then thirds.

Admiral Skipper beamed at her. "Does me good to see a gal who knows good food!" he said. "So many of 'em are always on a diet." His white eyebrows waggled as he turned to Wendy. "No offense, my dear."

"None taken," Wendy said with a grin. "Hey, you set out a good spread, Admiral man!"

The Admiral threw back his head and gave a booming laugh. "I like your spirit, girl!" he said. "Have you considered a career in the Navy? A woman can go far in today's Navy."

"No, sir," Wendy said. "I'm pretty much of a landlubber."

"Pity."

When even Mabel was full, they left Dogget to clear the table and went back to the sitting room. Admiral Skipper had them sit while he paced impatiently. "Better let me tell the whole story," he said. "I'm sorry for it, because parts are boring, but you need to know what you're dealing with. I hope you can make sense out of it. I can't!"

He launched into the story of his life—he had been born into a military family. "One brother retired as a three-star Army general, another won the Air Force Cross, and our little sister is currently a colonel in the USMC." The family was wealthy—"Our great-grandfather got into oil early, and he was good at identifying oil fields and stealing them from the rightful owners"—and Skipper had gone into the Navy fully expecting to have a long career.

Which he did, except—"Got stuck at the rank of captain!" he growled. "Nothing wrong with my performance. Always got outstanding reports. But, blast it, when your name is Skipper, and you're in the Navy—the joke was too good! Our skipper's Skipper! Don't get me started on the subject of names!"

"We know where you're coming from," Mabel chimed in. "My brother won't even use his real name! It's M—"

"That's enough, Mabel," Dipper interrupted. "Let the Admiral finish."

"Anyway," the Admiral said, "I voluntarily gave up my last command—you see the model there on the coffee table. Took shore duty instead. Couldn't stand the joking."

He finished his service career at Naval Base San Diego. "Got my promotion to Rear Admiral," he said. "I was put in charge of a hush-hush top-secret experiment. I can't go into it, but it had to do with instantaneous movement of a ship and its crew over hundreds of miles. Very technical. Anyway, things went wrong in the initial experiment. The ship didn't perform as expected. It vanished and then minutes later reappeared—but the crew suffered horribly. Most of 'em insane, some of 'em dead. And the ghost—I think, because I can't be sure—the ghost is one of the latter."

"You think he's seeking vengeance?" Dipper asked.

"Don't know, lad. He won't talk to me. But why would he seek vengeance from me? I didn't design the apparatus. All the sailors aboard the research vessel were volunteers. My main job was just to watch the experiment and preside over the writing of the final report. Why, I didn't even give the order to initiate the experiment. That came from upstairs, not from me." His shoulders sagged. "Of course when everything went to he—to Davy Jones's locker, if you follow me, I took the blame. They let me voluntarily retire—had my time in, no problem there. But I could have gained two more stars if not for being stuck as a captain for so long and then having my career cut short by the miserable experiment. I would have been a full Admiral, not just a one-star Rear Admiral."

Dipper heard Mabel stifle a laugh. She murmured, "Rear!"

"Sir," Dipper said, "you know, I'm not sure than exorcizing this ghost will help you all that much. I mean, you don't expect to be reinstated or anything, do you?"

"No, son, I don't. But—well, I'm an old man. I'll be a ghost soon myself! The truth is, I just want to do whatever I can so this poor bas—fellow can rest in peace. It weighs on my conscience. If you can banish it, or at least get it to talk and tell us what it wants, I'll do everything in my power to help it."

"I'll try," Dipper said.

"Dipper," Wendy murmured.

Dipper went on, "The first thing we have to do is make contact—"

"Dipper!" Mabel said, frantically tugging at his sleeve.

"—then I'll try an incantation to—what is it?"

"It's right behind you!" exclaimed both Wendy and Mabel.

Dipper spun around. Whatever he had expected to see—it was not the awful thing that hovered in the air, its horrible eyes glaring into his.


	4. Chapter 4

**The Big Con**

 **Chapter 4: The Man Who Wasn't (All) There**

 **From the Journals of Dipper Pines:**

 _Early Sunday morning, June 30: For just a second I was back in the Dusk-to-Dawn, staring at that . . . THING hanging in the ice locker. Eyes and a mouth and brains and, I guess, nerves—_

 _Except this wasn't like that, really. It was a ghost, or at least it looked something like one, glowing pale blue and floating in the air about two feet off the floor . . . but it was less the ghost of a person than—gosh, I don't know if I can even describe it._

 _OK, it was the floating, unconnected PARTS of a sort of human being, a really weird-looking one with a tiny head and arms and legs that were too long. They were severed, not part of one body at all, but bobbing in the air weirdly. It was like a marionette that had been unstrung and all the pieces were being worked by different puppeteers, who were all blindfolded. The face—I think that was the worst._

 _The eyes were blank and glowing a greenish-white. No irises or pupils, just the glowing globes—though somehow I KNEW they could see us. The head, well, it looked as if it had been scalped. I don't mean just bald. Well, it WAS bald, but you could also see fragments and peeling bits of flesh, and it looked as if blobs of, I guess, blood were floating just over the raw surface, except they weren't red but that transparent glowing blue shade. Sometimes the face had flesh, and sometimes it was all muscle and sinew and sometimes only a skull, all except for those glowing eyes. They never changed._

 _The body—the body parts—looked kind of like they had once been clad in a work shirt and jeans. There were no feet—the legs just faded out beneath the knees into a kind of trailing mist._

 _There was a kind of odor in the air, too, not a stinky one, but sort of oily, I guess, and kind of like the smell you get when you're around high-tension electric wires. And my skin kind of prickled up into goosebumps. All this, turning around, seeing the thing, and reacting, took only a second or so._

 _Then Mabel grabbed hold of me, tightly, yelling her head off. I guess I yelled a little, too. I mean, it was a horrible-looking thing. Wendy, though, Wendy pushed us behind her and took out her axe all in one smooth move. "Leave my friends alone, ghost dude!"_

 _In a mild voice, Admiral Skipper said, "I admire your spunk, young lady, but that won't really do any good."_

" _Oh, no? Duck, dudes! I'll check it out for MYSELF!" And she swung the axe as if she were attaching a redwood._

 _The blade whooshed right through the ghost. Well, that was normal. For a ghost, I mean. Which is abnormal, I suppose. Anyway, it was a good thing that Mabel and I had crouched down when she warned us, because the momentum of Wendy's swing made the axe whirl around above our heads. I heard the hiss of it as it cut the air._

 _The ghost didn't react at all. It just hovered there for a few seconds, its head bobbing and kind of nodding, its eyes staring at us. Then it started to . . . drift. It moved lazily through the air, like a puff of smoke._

 _Its parts kept changing—the arms became skeletal before getting back their flesh and shirt. The hand fell apart into a cloud of little bones before re-forming again. For a second you could see the organs in its chest, lungs and heart, and then they were hidden once more. The . . . the jumble of pieces, only approximately in the right positions, passed through the wall and into the hallway. We crowded at the door and saw it float back past the dining room, toward the back of the house. The light it gave off was real enough—I could see the glow lighting up the walls as it glided along._

 _Where the hall ended the ghost came to another framed ship picture, this one a blown-up color photo of a modern Navy ship. It passed right through without even pausing. "What's behind there?" I asked._

" _That's the back wall. Only the garden," the Admiral said. "No use trying to follow the thing now, though, my boy. It never appears outside. It's vanished. That's how it is. Sometimes it just shows itself and evaporates, other times it drifts around for hours and fades out as it goes through an outer wall. Usually it's silent, as it was just now, but sometimes it makes bizarre sounds, as if it's trying to talk. The words aren't in any Earthly language, though, or else they're hopelessly garbled. I'm pretty sure of that."_

" _That was flat-out WEIRD, man," Wendy said, reluctantly sheathing her axe. "How'd you know it wouldn't do any good to attack him?"_

 _The Admiral shook his head and heaved a sigh. "My dear Miss Corduroy, if you look at the wall of my study—which is where I first encountered the ghost nearly a year ago—you will find five bullet holes from a nine-millimeter M9 sidearm. Each one passed through the ghost's head or chest. Not a single one even slowed it down."_

" _Dude!" Wendy said. "You stood your ground. Good for you!"_

" _Thank you, but shooting it didn't solve my ghost problem." The Admiral smiled wearily. "Just as your axe didn't avail you."_

" _Nearly a year," I said. "Uh—do you remember the exact date?"_

" _Let me see. Not precisely," the Admiral said. He frowned, making his wrinkly face even more like a prune. "I didn't make a note of it, but just let me think . . . unless I'm mistaken, I believe it was late in August. Not the very end. Maybe around the twenty-third or twenty-fourth. Probably within a day one way or the other."_

 _Mabel said, "That was when Weird—"_

 _I nudged her and said, "Never mind all that."_

" _Oh. Sorry."_

" _Admiral, you told me that Mr. Preston Northwest recommended me. Do you mind if I ask how you know him?"_

" _We're members of the Gravity Falls Country Club," he said. "Last week we were both at a cocktail party there and fell into conversation. I don't have much in common with the Northwests, but you know how it is. You chat politely. Well, sir, the ghost had been more than usually boisterous the night before—jabbered those baffling sounds for nearly half an hour, just at midnight, kept me awake fuming about that for another three hours. I happened to mention to Northwest that I was leaving early because I felt exhausted, and I told him why. He then gave me the tale of the—lumberjack, was it? The lumberjack ghost that you confronted. Said you were the boy for such a task."_

" _I'll have to thank him," I said. "Sir, do you think the ghost might show up again tonight if we wait?"_

" _Very unlikely, my boy. On extremely rare occasions it appears twice in one evening, but most often we see it only once a night. Always at night, most commonly at midnight, though you'll note tonight it was two hours early. It's driving me crazy. Anything you can do . . . ."_

 _I promised him that I would read up on ways to summon ghosts. If we could be sure it would appear, we might be able to banish it, or at least speak to it and find out what its purpose is. I'm sure it was aware of us. Those empty eyes WERE staring at me. I could feel it._

 _Anyway, we waited around until fifteen past midnight, just on the chance it would show up again, but no luck. Wendy said she'd drive us back again tomorrow night—well, tonight now, really, since it's Sunday already. "I wanna see how you deal with this thing, Dipper," she said._

 _Mabel began, "Maybe you could get a lamb costume—"_

" _Zip it, Sis."_

* * *

Dipper and Mabel slept in that Sunday morning, making up for their late night. Then after Mabel went out to romp with Waddles, Dipper settled in at his desk in the attic, reading up on ghosts not only in the Journals but in the volumes of folklore he had brought with him from Piedmont. He also opened up his laptop and began to surf the web for advice on dealing with haunts and spooks.

He had packed a few emergency supplies, too, before boarding the bus for Gravity Falls—he had learned the previous summer that in that town it was good to be prepared for anything. In a small overnight bag he had a vial of anointed water, for example, and a round silver mirror (though that was supposed to work only on ghosts who materialized from paintings). He also had a bracelet made from rosewood (supposed to be protective against vampiric spirits) and a book of Latin spells meant to call up and to control ghosts. He copied out some of the likeliest-sounding chants, hoping that he could pronounce the Latin well enough for them to work.

The evening before, he had been too rattled to try to photograph the ghost with his cell phone, but he also had a good (though inexpensive) digital camera. He installed fresh batteries and checked it. Yes, it was working. Of course, ghosts were notoriously hard to catch in a picture. Still, worth trying.

In late afternoon, Dipper settled down and tried to catch a little sleep. If the ghost appeared at midnight or later, he wanted to be alert enough to react fast. He thought about how Wendy had sprung into action, drawing her axe from its sheath and shoving Dipper and Mabel behind her in one movement. "I wish I could be that quick," he murmured just before dozing off.

He drifted into sleep and into dreams, and though these made him toss and turn, he didn't wake up. Not for hours.

Then an incredibly loud WHONNNNK! jerked him awake, his heart hammering and his ears ringing. "Who—what—huh?"

"Air horn!" Mabel shouted, giving another ear-splitting blast. "Time for dinner, brogart! Melody said to wake you."

He was still shaking. "Don't _do_ that! I was having a dream—"

Mabel clambered onto the foot of the bed and folded her legs under her, bouncing on her knees. "Ooh, a dream about Wendy? Was she riding a handsome white stallion naked except for her beautiful long hair, like Lady Ghirardelli?" She frowned, her tongue sticking out. "No, wait, that's the wrong chocolate."

Dipper shook his head morosely. "I was dreaming about Bill Cipher, if you want to know. He'd come back, and he was mad and wanted to hurt me in the worst way possible. It was all messed up, and I don't really remember details, but, Mabel, I think—I think he'd killed you." His voice broke on the last words.

"Oh!" Mabel dropped the air horn and clapped her hands over her mouth. "You don't think—"

"He's _not_ back," Dipper said. "This was just a dream. I know the feel of Bill when he's in the Mindscape and worms his way into your head, and this wasn't anything like that." He sighed. "I don't think the ghost really has anything to do with Bill Cipher, but he showed up at the Admiral's house just about the time Bill opened that rift. That kind of worries me."

"You think he may be like a myrmidon of Bill's?"

"This time you mean 'minion.' From the look of him, I'd imagine he's more like a victim of Bill's. Anyway, I don't think the dream was a warning that Bill might be back. But it might possibly be an omen." Dipper paused, then said firmly, "Mabel, you can't come tonight."

"Whaaat?"

"It may be dangerous!"

She reached into her sweater and pulled something out. "In that case, I have two words: Grappling! Hook!"

"I don't want you to get hurt."

"Dipper," she said in a pleading voice, "don't you understand? You've got my back, and I've got yours. Mystery Twins!"

He stared at her before reluctantly returning her fist bump. "You're gonna go anyway, no matter what," he said.

"You can bet on it!"

"Okay. But Mabel—please, please don't take chances, okay?"

"Chances? Me? Ha! Brojangles, you know me!"

"Yes, I do," Dipper said. "That's why I'm worried."


	5. Chapter 5

**The Big Con**

 **Chapter 5: Backtalk**

This time they stopped for burgers and sodas at Greasy's Diner before traveling on to the Admiral's home. As they sat in a window booth in the back, away from the other customers and out of earshot, Wendy asked, "So what you got, Dip? Some voodoo root or somethin'? Are we gonna pound that sucka into powder? Boosh!"

"First," Dipper said, "we're just going to see if it can tell us what it's here for. See, usually ghosts have some kind of unfinished business on earth. Like the two old folks in the convenience store still held a grudge against all teens, even in the afterlife. When we went into their store, their resentment brought them back. If we hadn't found that out, I couldn't have—you know. Done the . . . lamby dance."

"You gonna eat your fries?" Mabel asked him.

"Yes."

"Too late!" she said through a mouthful of potato.

Wendy leaned across the table and nearly whispered: "Dude, the ghost doesn't talk. Or if it does, it doesn't make sense, the old guy says."

Dipper rubbed the back of his neck. "Well, if I can get it to speak at all, I'll try to record what it says. It may not even work—ghosts and vampires don't have any reflection in a mirror, and it's nearly impossible to photograph them. I don't know if it works the same with any sounds they make, but I'll give it a try." He pulled the digital camera out of his pocket. "I've got this set for movie mode. It captures sound, too."

"You gonna finish your burger?" Mabel asked him.

"No. You can have it." Dipper shoved his plate toward her.

But after looking at it, she pushed the quarter of a burger away. "Aw, don't just give up like that, Dip. I mean, what's the fun in that?"

Wendy grimaced. "If the ghost shows up, I hope it's not, like, hacked off at me for trying to axe it."

"Well, you pretty much didn't do anything to it, so I don't think it'll be too mad," Dipper told her. "What ghosts usually want is just to settle something that's left undone. Once they do that, they can move on to wherever their next place is. I'm hoping we can send the Admiral's haunt into the light, as they say."

"And that's like a one-way ticket out of the world?"

"You got it," Dipper told Wendy.

They paid the check and left, Lazy Susan bidding them a cheery goodnight. It was already dusky-dark outside. They drove up to the iron gate, it opened, and they rolled through the collection of military memorabilia. Dogget opened the door when they rang the bell.

"Come aboard," he said.

"Dogget, dude," Wendy said, jerking a thumb back over her shoulder, "what's the Admiral gonna do with all this hardware? Just use these things as really impressive lawn ornaments?"

Dogget shrugged. "He wanted to create a military museum here. Endow it so that after he passes away it will be open to the public. However, what with the ghost and all, that plan's on hold."

"Make a heck of a museum," Wendy said. "I'd pay to tour through it."

The Admiral, now in civvies—khaki pants, a white shirt and black bow tie, and a Navy blue sports jacket—met them in the sitting room. "Good evening, sir," Dipper said. "Has, uh, the ghost appeared tonight?"

"No sign of him so far," the Admiral replied. "Mind, it doesn't show up every single night, so we may have no luck this evening."

Mabel said, "I've been wondering, Mr. Admiral, does the ghost always fade into that picture in the hall when it disappears?"

"Frequently, but not always," the Admiral said. He stroked his chin thoughtfully. "Now that you mention it, I'd say it exits that way more often than any other, though. And he appears there pretty often, too."

"Let's take a look at the picture," Dipper said.

They went down the hall. The Admiral switched on a small but bright picture light over the framed photo. It was a big one—sixteen inches by twenty or thereabout. It must have been taken from another, larger ship, or maybe from a helicopter. The angle was looking slightly downward at the ship as it cut a wake through what looked like open seas.

"That was taken in the South China Sea during the 1960s," Admiral Skipper said. "The _USS Mistral_ , a patrol boat. Then she was being used as a communications vessel during the Vietnam War. By the time I knew her, she had been decommissioned from active service but was recalled to duty and used for the experiment I spoke about in the waters south of San Clemente. Complete debacle, as I told you, and the end of my career. She's decommissioned again now, I know, but I haven't heard what's become of her."

"I wonder if the ghost has anything to do with the experiment," Dipper said. "Can you tell us anything about it?"

The Admiral looked troubled. "Well, my boy, it's probably still classified. If I said too much, they might hang me at the yardarm. But some word of it got into the news even back then—supposed to have been an explosion on board, heavy loss of life, and so on and so forth, so I suppose I could tell you at least the bare facts. What really happened was that the machine that was supposed to make it possible for the _Mistral_ to travel rapidly and invisibly from one position to another hundreds or thousands of miles away malfunctioned. There was some kind of—I don't know, energy flare or something. Pulsating globe of purple light around the vessel, streaks of white-hot static electricity bursting from it. The crewmen's deaths came from that, not from an ordinary explosion. That's all I'd better say."

"Maybe the ghost blames you for its death," Mabel said.

"Can't think why. I didn't build the blasted machine, didn't design the experiment, and certainly didn't order anyone to participate. Wasn't even in charge of the vessel, come to that. I was just a Rear Admiral sailing a desk, and I had a knack for writing things clearly, so I was attached to the operation as an observer and reporter, that's all." The Admiral looked sadly at the photo. "If the ghost wanted to haunt someone who had real responsibility, it should go after the man who designed the experiment. Inventor fellow, civilian, what was his name—Mc-something."

"Oh, man," Mabel said. "Not McGucket?"

"Might have been. Might have been. Though that doesn't sound quite right."

"What year was this?" Dipper asked.

"It happened in July of, let me see—it was five years ago, or will have been in a week."

"Couldn't have been him," Dipper said. "The McGucket we know was crazy at the time."

"Well, maybe the name will come to me," the Admiral said. The recorded bells chimed loudly four times. "Four bells," the old man said, tilting his head to one side like an inquisitive dog. "Ten p.m. in civilian time."

"Want to wait 'til midnight, Dip?" Wendy asked.

"I . . . don't think so," Dipper told her. "I want to see if I can summon him and command him to talk."

"Are you even sure it's a guy?" Mabel asked.

"I'm not even sure it's _human_ ," Dipper said. He had brought in a satchel. He borrowed a small table from the Admiral, set it up in the hallway not far from the photo, and laid out his notes on it. He took his materials from his satchel. First he arranged three white candles and as he lit them, right to left, he read out the Latin chant: _Turbati mortuum vocat . Dic agedum nobis angustiae . Et omnis spiritus, ut consoleris._

"You think he's _French_?" Mabel whispered.

"Shh. I've called any troubled, restless spirit and offered to help solve any problem it has. I think something's happening," Dipper said. "Anyone else feel that strange electricky sensation in the air?"

On the table, left to right, the candles poofed out, one by one. The electric lights flickered, then died into stark darkness. "It's here, dudes," Wendy said, her voice sounding uneasy.

Wishing he still had light to read by, Dipper repeated what he remembered of the chant that was supposed to request ghosts to speak: _Loquere ! Dic nobis de vestra tristitia ! Loquere, quaeso._

"I know that means cheese," Mabel said, her tone frightened and shaky. "What, are you offering it a midnight snack?"

Dipper didn't respond. He suddenly felt as if he were standing outside, without a coat, on a frosty winter night. _Cold spots,_ he remembered from his reading. _A ghost's presence is often first noticed when its presence causes a sudden chill in the atmosphere._

Then the pale blue light suddenly billowed, a flower of silent, cold illumination blooming in the hallway, and in its midst floated the dismembered ghost. It seemed to struggle to open its mouth. Dipper had whipped out his camera and was recording—or he hoped he was.

But then when the ghost did produce sounds, they were inhuman, sounding like nothing any of them had ever heard before—something like "Ssuh ploich t'nemkseh uth poh-ts sdurl neew'teb rra eew! Ssuh ploich!"

The voice was reedy, and it seemed to come not just from one speaker, but from a chorus of small voices speaking in unison, as thin and buzzy as the drowsy murmur of summer bees in a hive.

"Can you speak English?" Dipper asked desperately. "We don't know your language! We want to understand and help you."

The specter writhed as if in agony or anger. "Rrrrahhh!" it screamed, thrashing its arms. They all took a step away from it.

"We don't understand," Dipper told it. "Look, we want to help you! Show us what you need. Please, let us help you!"

The ghost suddenly raised both of its arms over its head, straight up, like a referee signaling a touchdown. Then it swept its hands—trailing several inches behind the faster-moving wrists—around and down, sketching a glowing blue disk in the air. It flared and flashed and flickered, and Mabel yelled as some force pulled her up and toward the ghost. Her foot caught on the table top, and the little table crashed to the floor. Wendy scrambled forward and grabbed Mabel's leg—and was pulled along, kicking and screaming. Dipper lunged forward and just managed to seize one of Wendy's boots—

Only the Admiral was left behind.

All three of the kids screamed as they shot forward, tumbling into the glare of uncanny light—

And a moment later it swallowed them up and everything changed.

 _To be continued . . . ._


	6. Chapter 6

**The Big Con**

 **Chapter 6: Shadows in Fog**

Nothing. There was nothing.

 _Well,_ Dipper corrected himself, _there's light_. A kind of light, but so dim—like the false dawn on a day shrouded in fog. But all he saw were formless masses. It felt like being inside a roiling, simmering cloud—except there was no wind. He wasn't standing, but floating. Or falling. He had no sensation of either, but he couldn't feel the ground beneath his feet. He yelled, "Mabel! Wendy!"

No sound came from his mouth.

He couldn't see his hand inches from his eyes. He tried. He could feel his face, though, with his palm. He flailed around, swinging his arms as far as he could reach. Nothing.

Fighting panic, he tried to retrace his memories: _Wendy had hold of Mabel. I grabbed Wendy's boot. Then we tumbled over and over, and I lost my hold. Then we were—here._

 _Wherever "here" is._

"Ghost?" He tried to yell it, but he couldn't hear the sound of his own words. Maybe the ghost had telepathy. "Hey, ghost, we're trying to help you! Where are you?"

No answer, though the fog became more agitated. Everything was gray, a gray world with dark-gray swatches moving and boiling and dissolving and re-forming. Shapelessness and placelessness. Except for his body, nothingness.

But—he was alive. His pounding heart said he was. He tried to twist himself, to do a somersault, to look behind him, above him, below him. Didn't help. _No directions here._

 _Think! Think! What did the Journals say about this kind of experience?_

Nothing that he could remember. But—but there was something—

Grunkle Ford had told him once, when he'd answered maybe four of the six billion questions Dipper had about his grand-uncle's experiences and adventures. What had he said?

"Dipper, the other worlds weren't the toughest part of traveling through dimensions. Sure, they were the most dangerous, but the times I spent lost in between were what threatened my sanity."

 _The times I spent lost in between._

 _But Grunkle Ford had found his way back—true, with Grunkle Stan's invaluable help, but still—_

 _I wish I'd asked him how he made his way between worlds!_

Wait—was it getting lighter? Yes, ahead—a very dim, very tiny circle of that weird blue ghost-light. Or maybe not tiny, maybe just very distant. It did not move or float. It was a fixed point, the only fixed point, in all the random gray chaos.

 _I need to get there—_

Dipper tried to swim through the gray fog. _This is impossible. I can barely swim in water!_

He kept his gaze locked on the blue light, hoping it was a portal of some kind, hoping it would lead him home. But—

 _I won't go without Mabel and Wendy! I won't!_

Dipper stopped making an effort to move and hung there, breathing hard. He tried again: "Mabel! Wendy! Where are you?"

This time he heard his shout, but faintly, as if his voice came to him from a mile away, so thin that it was barely there at all. And—something? Did he hear something else? He held his breath, biting his lip in concentration.

"Dipper?" Yes, it was a mosquito-whine of a voice, at the very uttermost rim of hearing—Mabel? Wendy? He couldn't even tell.

"Here!" he yelled so hard that the word scraped his throat raw. It came out tiny, diminished, like a newborn kitten's first faint mew. "You sneeze like a kitten!" wax Sherlock Holmes had taunted him. Dipper balled his fists in frustration.

"Where?" Yes, it was a voice, lagging, as though he were speaking somehow to someone a mile away.

 _When you see the lightning, count the seconds until you hear the thunder, one-one thousand, two-one thousand, three—and for every five seconds, the lightning is one mile off. When I shouted, it took about five seconds for the response to come back. So we're a mile away. No—half a mile. Time there and then time back._

Dipper wished that could cheer him up. No, it couldn't, because in this gray nothing, a foot was as good as a mile.

"There's a light!" Dipper yelled. "Can you see it?" He hated how faintly his voice sounded in his own ears.

"Dipper? Where's Mabel?"

It was so soft he wasn't sure the sound hadn't come just from his imagination, but it seemed to come from the other side. "Wendy?"

"Dude?"

"Wendy!"

"Guys?"

"Mabel! We're all here! Wherever that is!"

"I can't see you guys!"

"Mabel, are you okay?"

For a few seconds they all babbled. Then Dipper yelled, "Wait, wait! Can you two see that sort of blue whirlpool of light?"

"Got it." That was Wendy.

"It's not a whirlpool, it's a pinwheel!" Mabel. Definitely Mabel.

"I think we're getting closer to it," Dipper yelled. "Or vice-versa. Head toward it if you can."

"Dude, I thought the light was a way _out_ of the world!"

"Yeah, I think we did that one already," Dipper called back. "I'm hoping this is the far side!"

He was feeling himself, patting down his clothes. He'd hung onto the camera—he stuffed it into a pocket of his vest and buttoned it in. His cap—ah, he touched it, floating a few inches above his head. He pulled it firmly on. Definitely lighter now, a world like the inside of a pearl, but he still couldn't see anything, not even his hand.

"I don't like this." Mabel again.

"I'm not having the thrill of a lifetime, either," Dipper called back. Not so hard to yell now, and it didn't have to be at the top of his lungs.

"Dipper, the light's way bigger now, man!"

Yes. If he kept his gaze on it, he could even tell it was growing by the second, as though they were speeding toward it.

Or—vice-versa.

 _I don't want to crash into it!_

"Hey!" came Mabel's shout. "Now it's slowed down."

 _Did I do that by thinking about it? Okay, little faster._

"I think we're moving again."

 _Steady, but not real fast._

"I'm almost there! Where are you guys?"

Dipper and Wendy answered at the same moment: "Close to it!" "About to hit it, man!"

It was like the—what, portal?—opened in the Admiral's hallway when the piecemeal ghost had swept its hands in an arc—bigger, though, the size of a house! And now Dipper could see that the edges flashed and crackled with some kind of energy—

Uh-oh.

What had the Admiral said about the experiment aboard the _Mistral?_ A purple fog with bolts of white static electricity? Killed men like an explosion?

"I think we're gonna be sucked through!" Dipper yelled. "Try to ball up and roll when you pass through—we'll probably hit some kind of ground!"

He could feel it now, feel the vacuum of it, urging him onward, like a wind without substance.

 _Let us survive this! Let Mabel and Wendy be safe!_

Now from the corners of his eyes Dipper glimpsed two shadowy forms on his right and his left—one smaller, one taller. Had to be them. Had to—

"Dipper, man, I think I see you now! What is this stuff we're in?"

"I don't think it's anything! Try to stay loose—here we go!"

He had dived off the tallest cliff in the world into a small luminescent pool thousands of feet below. It took forever to fall, but the fall accelerated, and now that the pool surface rippled close he was slamming toward it—

 _It feels like an electric shock!_

—darkness—

—heat—

"Hunh!"

He landed hard, on his shoulder, and rolled three or four times. Hard surface, asphalt or concrete, and it was warm, the air muggy, distant sounds of traffic.

His head was spinning and he couldn't stand up at first. Half-sitting, half-reclining, braced on his left arm, he coughed and said, "Mabel? Wendy?"

"Ohhhh. Every bone in my body is broken! No, wait, my nose is still cute."

"Mabel! Where are you?"

"Here . . . ohhh. Where's Wendy? Wendy?"

"I'm OK, guys. Where'd the light go?"

"I think it's one-way," Dipper said, unsteadily finding his feet. "Wonder where we are?"

"Not in the Porta-Potty again," Mabel said. "It doesn't smell as bad. But it's about as dark!"

A hand brushed Dipper's back. He reached and caught it. "Mabel?"

"No, me. Dip! Man, I thought we were goners!"

"Where are you?"

"Right here, Mabel! Close by. Just follow my voice. Come on. We're standing right here—OUCH! You poked your finger in my eye!"

Mabel was patting his face. "Is this Dipper? You must have been bruised up, bro-wo. You feel all lumpy and weird!"

"It's me, and take your finger out of my nose!"

"Eew! Bro-boogies!"

"I think we're in, like, a parking lot or something," Wendy said. "But it's pitch-dark."

"I don't think we're outside at all," Dipper replied. "There's kind of a faint echo. We might be in a big empty warehouse or something."

"I think there's a crack of light," Mabel said. "Here, grab my hand. Wendy?"

"No, Dipper. I'm holding hands with Wendy with my right."

"Ooh la-la!"

"Mabel!" snapped Dipper and Wendy together.

"Okay, kidding aside, I'll lead you."

They shuffle-stepped, not knowing what they might trip over in the darkness. It felt like a concrete surface, smooth and hard. In a few seconds, Dipper saw it, too, a faint narrow streak of light, vertical. Dim, but light."

They reached a barrier. Metal. "It's like huge sliding doors," Dipper said. "They go up like thirty feet!"

Mabel was huffing and puffing. "I can't—open—them!" She panted for breath and then added, "You think giants live here?"

Dipper pressed his face close to the crack. "There are lights away off. I think we're in a town, but maybe on the outskirts. There ought to be a normal door someplace. Let's feel our way along."

"You dudes go left, I'll take the right," Wendy said.

They did, palms flat against the metal. Dipper and Mabel hit brick or concrete and then a corner and another wall. "Nothing!" Dipper yelled.

"I think this is a door," Wendy called back. "Come and help me."

As fast as they could, Dipper and Mabel shuffled over to her. Dipper bumped into her in the darkness. "Yeah, it's definitely a door," he said, feeling the handle. "But it's locked."

"If only we had some light!"

"Hang on," Dipper said, feeling his pockets. "I've got my cell phone." He found it and thumbed it on. The welcome screen popped into visibility, and then he touched the flashlight app. It gave them a glow sufficient to show that there was a thumb-operated deadbolt nearly a foot above the door handle.

"I got it," Wendy said, reaching to turn it.

Dipper's flesh crawled. Wendy's hand—the hand he'd been holding—

It looked like nothing human.


	7. Chapter 7

**The Big Con**

 **Chapter 7: It's Not Me—It's Them!**

They all had to lean on the door—it must not have been open for ages. The hinges gave a rusty groan of protest, the bottom of the door scraped what felt like a ton of junk, and slowly they forced an opening big enough to worm through. A streetlight glowed a hundred yards away—but its feeble light was enough to show them the horror they had fallen into.

"Wendy! Is that you?" Dipper wailed.

"Me? I'm OK, dude, but you and Mabel—"

Dipper gawked at Mabel, who was standing with her hands clasping her cheeks and her eyes wide with horror. _She had changed just like Wendy!_

Gasping for air, Dipper looked down at himself. "But—but I look the same. I mean, I haven't changed the way you two—"

Mabel finally found her voice: "Dipper! How'd you grow so _tall_?"

"Huh? Mabel, you're looking over my head. Here are my eyes!"

"Dude," Wendy said, "you're pointing at your chest! OMG, you're only like three inches shorter'n me now!"

"But you're like a head taller than you were!"

"Wah-wah-whoa!" Mabel said. "Okay, let's get this clear. Can we walk closer to the light?"

"I don't know if I _want_ to," Wendy confessed.

But they did, until it showed as much as any of them cared to see. Dipper held up his hands to quiet the worried murmurs of the other two. "Okay, okay. So—each of us looks the same to herself or himself as they always did, right?"

"Yeah," Mabel said. "I'm still the same. But you guys—"

"It has to be an illusion," Dipper said. "Look, let's each describe the others. I'll go first. Mabel, _you're_ the one who's taller! You're all sort of stretched out. And your head is only _half_ the size it should be. Open your mouth. You've still got your braces, but now they're like little _machines_ almost, with silver wires connecting them. Your sweater's still the shooting-star but it has, I don't know, _texture_ now! And why is it so lumpy?"

"Grappling hook," Mabel said. "It feels so heavy now! And it doesn't just sort of disappear inside my sweater anymore. What's up with that?"

"Girl, my axe is givin' me problems, too," Wendy said. "Usually it just, like, tucks into the sheath on my back, under my hair, and I can't even feel it until I reach for it. Now it's like _solid_ back there. Dipper, am I—am I like, a _monster_?"

"Oh, no, Wendy," Dipper said. "You're—well, you're beautiful! You still have your long red hair that reaches down to your knees, you still have your freckles, and you haven't stretched as much as Mabel, but you look a little taller. Your legs have, I don't know, more shape to them, and you have bigger boo—uh, a bigger, bigger—"

"You have a bigger bust," Mabel said. "A real figure."

"Oh, man, I wish! Okay, Dipper, you nailed it, dude. You're like, I don't know how to say it, rounder. Not fat, not fat, kinda skinny in fact, but your head's smaller too. Your clothes are the same, but you're right, there's a texture to them now. And I can see pockets in your vest with bulges in them."

"Wendy," Dipper said, holding up his hand, "How—how many fingers do I have?"

"Five, man. Hey, so has Mabel!"

"So do you."

"No way!"

"Hey," Mabel said, "Here comes somebody."

"Let's step back into the shadows," Dipper cautioned.

From where they stood concealed, they saw a motorbike—a little one, though—and heard it blatting its way down the street. When it went past, they saw that the rider was—was, well, like them. More—rounded. His arms had two distinct parts and weren't noodly at all. He stopped for a couple of moments at a stop sign and bent over to do something to one of his boots, so they got a good look.

When the little bike had growled off, Dipper said, "I think we're in some weird other dimension, guys. Either we've changed to look like the people here, or else there's some kind of illusion spell on us so that others see us that way."

They trudged back to the warehouse. The sky was starting to lighten. "We must've moved in time, too," Mabel said. "It wasn't even midnight when the ghost showed up."

"I'm afraid we could be anywhere or anywhen," Dipper said.

"And we don't even have a tape measure!"

"Uh—am I missin' something here?"

Dipper sighed. "Long story, Wendy. Ask me about it later."

They could tell now that the sun was rising off behind a range of hills. In the pre-dawn light, they saw that the warehouse looked abandoned. They had shoved the door open against a collection of accumulated mud, leaves, and a clutter of fast-food wrappers. Dipper squinted upward. "What's that written on the front?" he asked, pointing up above the tall sliding doors, which were chained shut with heavy, rusty links.

"Hard to read, it's so faded," Wendy replied. "M . . . c . . . capital G . . . u . . ."

"McGucket!" Mabel exclaimed. "I knew it, I knew it, I knew it!"

"Chill," Wendy said. "It's McGusset's."

"McGusset!" Mabel said. "I knew it all along!"

Dipper said, "That must be the name of the guy who designed the ship experiment. The one the Admiral couldn't quite remember."

"So . . . what do we do?"

Dipper turned to Mabel. "I guess first we ought to go back inside and try to get a little rest. Then after daylight, we have to see if we can find any place to get information. Man, I wish I had the Journals here! Or at least the slip of paper with my incantation notes."

They got back inside—the darkness was still heavy there—and forced the door as far closed as they could. Dipper took out his cell phone and used its flashlight function, but the gloom swallowed the glow. They went back into the place—the back wall seemed to have offices or something. None of the doors were locked, and at last they found a light switch.

It didn't work.

"Electricity's off, I'm sure," Dipper said.

But there was a desk and a chair and file cabinets. Mabel rummaged and came up with a flashlight—and it worked.

They took turns shining the light on each other. "You look weird, Dip," Mabel said, shining the light above his head. "But not weird in a monstery way. Now that I'm getting used to you, you actually look OK.'

"You look kinda hot," Wendy teased. "In a weird way, like Mabel says."

Dipper groaned. _She would say that when I've been transformed into some other-dimension creature!_

But it gave him an idea. He took out his camera and with its built-in flash he took photos of both Wendy and Mabel. Then Mabel took one of him.

"Wow," Wendy said, staring at the picture of her. "I do have boobs! But the rest of me's so ugly, man!"

"No, it isn't," Dipper said. "Now that I'm getting used to it, you—well, you look h—you look really good."

"Say it!" Mabel said, poking him with both fingers again. "Say she looks h-o-t, hot!"

"Lay off, Sis!"

"Hey, Dip," Wendy said. "Check it out, dude!"

He stared at the picture on the camera's back screen. "Is that _me_?"

"It's this dimension's version of you, I guess," Wendy said. She squirmed. "This axe is really uncomfortable now!"

Mabel had taken the flashlight and had gone out scouting. "Guys! Come and look!"

They followed her voice. At the far side of the warehouse stood ranks of strongly-built shelves, each about five feet above the next lower one. The bottom two were cluttered with what looked like computer components and electronics, though all jumbled up. On the third one up, though, was furniture—easy chairs and sofas. "We can nap up there!"

"It'll be a climb," Wendy said.

"Nope! Grappling hook!" Mabel took it out—it tangled in her sweater, and she complained, "That's not supposed to happen!" She fired it and scored a hit as its grapnel caught between the corner brace and the third-level shelf. She grinned and threw the switch.

The line tautened, but it didn't lift her off the ground. "What the hey?" She moved closer, and the little rewind motor whined, but it didn't have enough power for her weight. "Why is this happening?"

"I think we probably weigh proportionately more here," Dipper said. "We don't notice it because our muscles have been scaled up, but the grappling hook—well, it's feebler in this dimension, maybe."

"I got it, dudes," Wendy said. She took hold of the line, swung herself up, and rappelled up the corner post.

Impulsively, Dipper and Mabel began to chant, "Wen-dy! Wen-dy! Wen-dy!"

"You guys," she said from above them. She unfastened the grapnel. "Hey, there's a ladder over there in the corner! Just a sec."

"Don't fall," Dipper cautioned. He took the flashlight from Mabel and helped guide Wendy over. She stooped and picked up something rolled up. Then she came back, hooked it over the edge of the shelf, and unrolled it. It was an escape ladder, ropes holding wooden treads.

"Test it out," Wendy said.

Dipper knew that Mabel would want to go first. And she did, climbing hand over hand. "This is fun!"

He followed. It wasn't fun. The ladder swayed and he felt as if it would tip him off at any moment. But the girls helped him up at the top.

"We got one short loveseat and two sofas," Mabel said. "Wendy and I got dibs on the sofa. Dip's on the loveseat!"

The furniture had been covered by canvas dust-sheets. Fortunately, because when they moved the canvas, clouds of dust floated up, making them all sneeze.

They stretched out—Dipper found that his head rested on one of the loveseat arms, his heels propped up on the other arm. _I must be taller,_ he thought. _I should be able to fit between the arms!_

His second thought was that he'd never be able to calm down enough to sleep.

His third was _Where am I?_ as he woke up a couple of hours later.

Daylight filtered into the warehouse from a row of small windows running around both sides of the structure. It was mostly empty—an oil drum stood here, a long uncoiled chain lay there, other debris scattered about.

Mabel was making her little sing-songy sleep sounds. Wendy lay on her side, her axe on the shelf right beside the sofa. Dipper quietly got up and climbed down. It might be worthwhile taking a look outside now that it was light enough to see.

He pushed the door open again, easier now that they had bulldozed the dirt and trash partway out of the path. He stepped outside and stopped in his tracks.

A—well, a guy, one of the strange-looking denizens of this dimension, stood in the parking lot in front of the abandoned warehouse. He might have been twenty years old or thirty, or, for all Dipper knew, forty. These strange-looking people were hard to read. Behind him was a—parked car, Dipper supposed, a battered old white van of some kind—no make or model that he could identify.

But the guy, tall and sort of dumpy-looking with brown hair, was taking photos of the warehouse, and he was muttering to himself, "Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy! I found it!"

 _Well, at least they speak English!_

"Uh—hi," Dipper said.

"Oh, I'm not doing anything wrong," the guy said, hurriedly turning around. "This is the place! This is what inspired McGucket's—oh, man! You too? Seriously good costume, dude. I _got_ to take a picture of you! Okay?"

"Um, sure, dude, knock yourself out."

He stood in front of the big chained door while the guy took about six photos. "Man, I wish I was in cosplay mode. I'm Soos, ya know."

"You—you're Soos? From Gravity Falls?"

"Well, when I'm in costume—Dipper! Oh, man, McGucket's real lab and I run into Dipper Pines!"

From the doorway came Wendy's voice: "Dipper? What's up?"

" _Eeeeeeeeee!_ " squealed the photographer. "Wendy Corduroy. OMG, you guys are great! You have to enter the contest! Ya got a Mabel?"

"Here," Mabel said, coming out the door behind Wendy. "What's going on?"

"Uh, Mabel, Wendy, this guy says he's Soos," Dipper said.

"Oh, man, you stay in _character!_ 'Scuse me while I have a nerdgasm! Pictures! All of you pose together! Oh, man, if you just had an axe and the grappling hook!"

"Just a sec," Mabel said. She ran back inside the warehouse, and when she came back she carried both.

 _Soos_ looked as if angels had come to fly him to heaven. "Those are _perfect!_ Who did your costuming? Who did Wendy's hair and Mabel's braces? Oh, man! You guys are headed to the con, right? Hey, how'd you get out here? Where's your car?"

"Our car?" Wendy asked.

Dipper thought fast. "We got, uh, carjacked. They took everything—all our money and junk. We just had what we were wearing. We, uh, we'd hunted out this place just like you did, and they got away when we were inside taking pictures of each other."

"Oh, man, that's tragic!" The tall guy stuck out his hand. "Hi, dude, my name's Brad Begman. Everybody calls me "Soos," though, 'cause of I really like cosplay. This is my sixth time. This time I drove by myself all the way to San Diego from Cordele, Georgia, for this. So—who are you?"

"Uh, well, this is my twin—no kidding, we're really twins—and we're from Piedmont. I'm, uh, well, my sister first. Her name is—"

"Emma," Mabel said promptly. "Emma Palm. My brobro's Diggory Palm." She ignored Dipper's furious glare. "And this is our friend Willow Cambric."

"Buuuut like you, we prefer to be called Dipper, Mabel, and Wendy," Dipper hurriedly added.

"And y'all are from Piedmont? Like Al? Piedmont, California?"

"Uh, Piedmont, Oregon," Dipper said. "Quite a coincidence. Little, small town. Not, not even on the map. So we wouldn't know your friend Al."

"Hah!" Begman laughed. "I _wish_ he was my friend! But look, guys, seriously, you have your room reservation? Your memberships?"

"They took everything," Mabel said, sounding desolated.

"Guys, ride in with me. I have a few connections. I'll find some way to fix it up, see what I can do. Hey, I was gonna stop and grab some breakfast. You guys hungry?"

"Hun-gry!" Mabel chanted.

"Season 1, Episode 6!" chortled Brad, to the complete mystification of Dipper. "Okay, guys, you're comin' with me, climb aboard. Van's a mess, and it's prob'ly a little smelly, took me four days to drive out here. But you can crash in my room if you want, and I'll buy your breakfasts. I hope McDonalds is OK."

"Oh, it'll be great," Dipper said. "We—Willow, you ride up front. Ma—my sister and I will take the backseat. We owe you big time, Brad."

"Oh, man, think nothin' of it! We gotta stick together, right?" He paused and then almost shyly added, "Hey, my Soos costume isn't near as good as yours, but you think we might team up? I've already paid my entrance fee for the Fringe Con masquerade tonight, and it's good for up to four in a group. First prize is a thousand bucks, and I think with you three we'd have a real shot!"

Wendy spoke up: "Sure, man. We could use some walkin' around money."

"Oh, man, you absolutely _nail_ her voice! Do me a favor? Punch the top of the van and yell 'Brad-ford!'"

"Sure, dude, whatever."

And they rolled out of the parking lot to the rhythmic punching and the chant, and Brad "Soos" Begman had yet another nerdgasm. "Man, I _love_ Gravity Falls!"

In the backseat, Mabel looked at Dipper and mouthed, "What's McDonalds?"

And Dipper could only shrug.


	8. Chapter 8

**The Big Con**

 **Chapter 8: When I Say "Kara"**

Wendy came up with the idea. Around ten in the morning they arrived at the biggest building Dipper had ever seen—and because of its strange solidity, it loomed even larger.

That was an unnerving thing about this world: things seemed heavier, denser somehow. And more detailed. You could see individual leaves on trees from a great distance. Even little things—flies weren't just small black bodies with sketchy wings, but intricate organisms, the membranes of the wings prismatic, the segmented abdomen furred with the finest hairs imaginable.

On the other hand, Dipper had a feeling that if Quentin Trembley had ridden his horse backward over a cliff in this world, he would have found a sudden splashy death instead of founding Gravity Falls Valley.

From the minute they walked toward the building, they attracted attention. Three times in less than twenty feet people stopped them and begged them to have their pictures taken with them.

Fourth time, Wendy said, "Sure, dude. Two bucks for each person posing."

Before they even got to the building they'd made fifty-two dollars. "Grunkle Stan would be proud of you," Dipper told Wendy.

Brad Begman went inside and was gone for half an hour, or forty-four more dollars. "We don't need to enter the contest," Mabel said. "We're like the darlings of the paparazzi. Or is that a kind of pizza?"

Brad showed up with a serious-looking guy named Graham, his dark hair cut short, his eyes blue behind horn-rimmed glasses. "Oh, man!" he said when he caught sight of them. "Yeah, we can take care of this. Tell you what, I'll get you three temp passes for today, and when things get less crazy we'll track down their registrations."

"Good job, dude," Brad said. "High five!"

Graham laughed but made no move until Brad said in a fairly good imitation of Soos's voice, "C'mon, dude, don't leave me hangin'!"

They slapped palms and after getting name badges on lanyards—they all read "TEMP" with their made-up names scrawled underneath with permanent markers, except Dipper wouldn't stand for "Diggory" and instead got the inscription _"Dipper" Palm._

Brad had the full package, name tag with his right name on it, a canvas bag full of convention swag, the whole bit. "Okay," he said. "I got the con app on my phone, so we can take a look at the schedule. Uh, guys, as long as we're inside, no charging for the pictures, OK? It's kind of a rule."

"You got it, man," Wendy said. "Hey, can we pay you back for breakfast?"

Brad actually blushed. "Naw, that was on me. Look, I work in IT and moonlight as a sound engineer and sometimes a keyboardist. I save my money all year and schedule my two weeks' vacation just for this trip. Happiest times of my life are when I'm roaming around here in costume as Soos. You guys are just makin' it happier. Anyways, it was just fast-food."

"We're gonna chip in some for gas, anyhow," Wendy said. "It's incredibly expensive here!" She counted out fifty dollars, all but twenty in singles. "Here ya go, Brad. For bein' our knight in a white Charger . . . van."

"That's awful nice of you," Brad said.

"Hey, when you get costumed up, you gotta pose in all the pictures with us," Dipper told him.

Brad looked away. "All the times I've come here," he said softly, "I've met people I liked. But I never really made a friend here before today."

"You have now," Mabel said, giving him a playful sock on the arm.

Before they had been in the convention hall for more than an hour, Dipper pulled Wendy and Mabel aside. "Guys," he said, "have you figured it out yet? You know what we are?"

"Messed up," Wendy said. "I'm almost used to the weird people strollin' around here—then I remember I _am_ one!"

They were in a niche, and though a crowd shuffled past toward some big panel or other, no one was looking at them. Lowering his voice, he said, "In this world we're _cartoon characters_! There's a table of books down the hall here about half a mile, and one of the books is all about the art of _Gravity Falls_. We're all on the cover, sittin' in the bonfire clearing, posing with Grunkle Stan—and though it's a drawing, it looks like us. The real us!"

"Whoa," Mabel said. "Heavy!"

Wendy's brow wrinkled in thought. "Yeah, and the things Brad says about seasons and episodes—he's talkin' about stuff that really happened to us, man! But how does a TV cartoon show _know_ that? Are our lives really patterned on somethin' that's on TV for kids in this world?"

Mabel said pensively, "That is either profound philosophy or completely nuts."

"Grunkle Ford would know," Dipper said. "He'd say, I dunno, something like there are many universes and billions of worlds in each, and the ones that are closest sort of reflect the nearest ones—I don't know. But we're real—and _this_ is real, too. And I have the feeling that the ghost brought us here for a reason."

"What is it?" Mabel asked.

"I just don't know."

"Aw, man," Mabel said. "You always run out of steam at the worst times!"

In early afternoon they went with Brad when he checked into the hotel room. It had two queen-sized beds—he said, "Smallest one I could get because I reserved too late. Just four months before last year's con."

"So, okay, me and Mabel will take one of the beds, and you an'—"

"You'll take the other," Dipper told Brad. "I'll sleep on the little sofa there—"

"Love seat," said Mabel.

"– _whatever,_ because I toss and turn a lot."

"Dudes," Brad said, "I am gonna unpack a little, and then I'm gonna take a shower. Could you guys use one?"

"Diggory could," Mabel said.

"Okay, we'll take turns. We can, like, get dressed in there, so take your clothes—oh, sorry, I forgot, you just have the costumes. Hey, should we like notify the cops or something?"

"I did already," Wendy said with a straight face. "Called them on Dip—Dig's phone and one showed up at the con while you were in that panel. Gave them the full report. They're lookin' for my car, but I don't know if they really expect to find it."

"What is it?"

"A really old Dodge Dart slant six," she said automatically. Then she looked apprehensive. "Don't know if you ever even heard of those things."

"Oh, yeah," Brad said with a grin. "That's the car you can't kill, you know. Okay, tell you what, I'll get into my Soos costume after the shower and you guys can critique it for me."

He came out of the bathroom in the khaki parachute shorts, billowy dark-green question-mark T-shirt (extra-long) and brown cap.

"I can see the resemblance," Dipper said. "Be Bigfoot."

They all laughed when he immediately struck an almost walk-like-an-Egyptian pose, head swiveled and eyes popping in a vacant expression. "You got it!" Mabel chortled. Okay, we're gonna turn you into the ideal Soos."

After they had all showered, they huddled in a council about the masquerade. "Each contestant has two minutes to show off," Brad explained. "They're real strict about shutting you down if you go one second over. Most people just come out and do poses, but some have little acts."

Mabel, who was working with mascara to add wispy mustache and beard hairs to Brad's face, said, "Little acts, hm? And you can play a keyboard?"

"Yeah, in a little pick-up band in Cordele. Me and three other guys. We do mostly covers, but write some of our own stuff, too. Nothin' big."

"Could you maybe synthesize a tune if I hummed it?"

"Oh, sure, easy. I learned to play by ear before I could even read music, and I got my laptop and a program that—"

"Let me work my magic," Mabel said. "And then you and I are gonna put our heads together. I think I have just the thing."

Hours later, on a stage set up in a park overlooking the bay, Dipper thought, _This is a really bad idea._

The masquerade had different categories: Live-action sf/fantasy. Animated sf/fantasy. General TV. General movies. Three or four more. They were in "Animated sf/fantasy." He didn't recognize any of the other contestants, except those in Gravity Falls garb. None of them looked particularly realistic. There were also kids with triangular heads and pop eyes, a girl dressed as a big yellow duck for some reason, lots of anime-looking characters . . . some of the costumes were very good.

Because Brad had registered for the masquerade a year before, they drew a high number—their act would be number 12 out of a total of 70. Just before their turn, two teens, one dressed in a black suit and the other in a brown business suit, had gone onstage to do a brief skit. Dipper gathered one was Sherlock Holmes the other Dr. Watson. Funny how both universes shared some things, skipped others—Sherlock Holmes was a fictional character in both, Dodge Darts were real cars in both—

'We're on," Mabel said. "C'mon, guys, just like we rehearsed!"

They bounded on stage, and in the audience flashguns popped. "All right!" somebody yelled. "Gravity Falls!"

Mabel grabbed the microphone as Brad quickly set up the laptop, cued it, and plugged into the sound system. "How are you, San Diego?" Mabel yelled into the mic. "Ready to rock?"

An ear-shattering "Yes!"

"First, I gotta say that last guy as Sherlock Holmes? Please, he didn't even have a mustache!"

That got a big laugh for some reason Dipper couldn't quite figure out. The lyrics of the song were on the laptop screen, and Brad gave them a thumbs up.

"Okay," Mabel yelled again as the laugh died down. "I'm Mabel, that's Soos, this is Dipper, and that's Wendy Corduroy! And together we are Love Patrol Beta!"

Dipper grumbled, "I still never agreed to that name!"

"And we're gonna sing the newest hit from &ndra, "At the Con!"

Soos/Brad hit a key, and the music began to pulse. Mabel took the lead:

 _Hey, Dad, I'm textin' from Diego—_

 _I know, you said "No, you can't go—_

 _But Dad, here I am with my game on,_

 _Goin' to a party at the world's greatest Con!_

The audience cheered and began to clap along.

Brad, Wendy, and Dipper joined in as backup on the chorus:

 _Comic-Con, the world's greatest party!_

 _Guys are lookin' hunky, gals a little tarty!_

 _Who knows, we may meet a special someone._

 _Need a hero? Why not just become one?_

 _Put your cape on and your tight Spandex pants,_

 _Join in, 'cause everybody's gonna dance!_

 _Let the music go rockin' on and on and on,_

 _Hey, hey, havin' fun here at the Con!_

The crowd went completely wild. They wrapped up the song and came in at a minute and forty-two seconds, so to fill up the time, Mabel passed the mic around. In his pretty-good Soos voice, Brad said, "My wisdom is both a blessing—"

The audience yelled "—and a curse!"

Wendy took the mic. "'Cause I'm a flippin'—

"—Corduroy! Go, girl, go!"

Mabel: "I call him Waddles, 'cause—"

"—he _waddles_!"

And finally Dipper.

"My name is Dipper, and the girl about to—"

"—puke is my sister Mabel! Yay, Mabel!" The applause went on and on.

They got the time signal on the button, Brad switched off and unplugged the laptop, they took a bow, and it was over.

Backstage, Wendy collapsed. "Oh, man, I have never been so scared in, like, my entire life!"

"Not even in the Fearamid?" Brad asked with the widest grin Dipper had ever seen on a human face.

"Dude, in the Fearamid I was _mad,_ not scared!"

The hapless couple who went on next—a Mad Hatter and an Alice who did a little minuet—didn't get much of a response. "We," Mabel announced in a smug tone, "are a hard act to follow."

Three hours later, she was fuming. "Second place? We got a lousy _second place?_ After that reaction?"

"Hey," Brad said. "It's still five hundred dollars! Look, tell you what, I'll take a hundred, and that'll more than cover the entrance fee. You guys get the rest, but I get to keep the trophy to show the folks back home, OK?"

"You can have the trophy," Dipper said.

Mabel was tapping her foot, her arms crossed on her chest. "I don't even know what a Pokey Man is!"

Brad sounded comforting: "Well, it's a big, big fad right now."

"Come on, girl," Wendy said, putting her arm around Mabel's shoulder. "Four hundred bucks is a lot better'n nothing."

"Plus," Brad told her, "there are like two hundred people out there waiting to have their picture taken with us. Two bucks a head, you're gonna be OK."

"Yeah," Mabel grumped. "But second place!"

She was even angrier forty-five minutes later when a blonde girl in a sea-foam dress and tiara—a not very convincing Pacifica—insisted on getting her photo taken kissing Dipper on the mouth.

Especially when someone explained to her what "shipping" meant.


	9. Chapter 9

**The Big Con**

 **Chapter 9: Talkback**

That night Wendy and Mabel turned in early, but neither Brad nor Dipper was ready for sleep—Brad was too elated over their second-place finish and his trophy ("This'll show 'em back in Cordele!") and Dipper was worried because he had no idea what to do next.

The hotel had a lobby with many nooks and a strong Wi-Fi signal, though, so Brad spent some time posting photos of his trophy and one of the group online. Dipper thought that most of his friends were the ones he never saw but only chatted to on the computer.

Meanwhile Dipper took out his camera and played back the footage he'd tried to shoot of the ghost. As he'd feared, there was no distinct figure to be seen—a kind of flickering blue light was all. But the voice was there—the weird, distorted sounds that weren't like any words.

"What's that, dude?" Brad asked, looking up at the noise.

"Nothing. Just, uh, something that I got from somebody I know. It's supposed to be like a code, but I can't make sense out of it."

"It's backward masking," Brad said promptly.

"Huh?"

"It sounds like normal speech played backwards. They did that in the show, season 1, episode 19. Man, that was a good one! Remember? Bill Cipher made a bargain with Li'l Gideon to go into Stan's mind and steal the combination to his safe? Li'l Gideon's incantation's just the words 'backwards message' back-masked. And Bill Cipher later—"

"Wait, what? You mean if we played these sounds backwards—we might get something understandable?"

"Well, yeah. And the hissing sounds like wind, they're probably part of it too. You don't really notice them so much under the words. Sorta like an electrical discharge or something. Alex used that at the end of the show—"

"How could I play it backwards?"

Brad grinned. "Leave that to the Handyman of the Electronic Age. Let me borrow your camera. Huh, don't recognize the make, but it has a standard USB micro socket." He rummaged through his laptop case and came up with a short black cable. "Let me perform my magic."

Dipper watched as he plugged the cable into the laptop and camera. Then he switched the camera on and checked the laptop. "Yup, here it is as 'USB Storage Device.' Okay, let's see—only one video stored, has to be it. Take a second to copy . . . there. Close that, open this . . . open the file . . . I could isolate the soundtrack, but it's faster just to play the whole thing. Here we go."

Just as it had when Dipper first confronted the ghost, his skin pimpled up and he felt the hair on his neck bristling. The chorus of buzzing, faint voices now was saying words—distorted words, true, but barely intelligible, with a wrenching tone of agony: "Hhelllp usss . . . we arrr lossst bet-a-ween worls. Stoppp the es-per-uh-ment. 'Elp usss."

"Ooh, creepy," Brad said.

"Help us," Dipper said. "We are lost between worlds! Stop the experiment! Help us!"

"That's not from an episode, is it?"

Dipper said, "Uh, no. It's kind of . . . kind of a fan thing."

"Hang on. Hear the hissing? It's whispering, Dig. Let me isolate it—right. And I'll damp out the back-masked message. I think the whispers are backwards, too, but we'll see in a second. This'll be hard to make out, so listen close."

At first Dipper couldn't be sure that the new whispered message wasn't all in his head. But as they listened twice, then three times, he said in a shaky voice, "Brad, back me up on this. Pause after every word and let's see if we can agree on what we're hearing."

"You got it, dude." Brad grinned. "This is great, man! You guys really take your cosplay to the extreme. We gotta keep in touch after the con."

"Uh, sure. I'll—we'll try," Dipper said.

"Ready? First word."

He played it, and they both said it together: "McGusset."

Word by word. Twice they slightly disagreed and played those doubtful ones over and over until one or the other gave in to the other's interpretation. Dipper had a hotel scratch pad and painfully wrote out what the whispers seemed to say: "McGusset aboard Mistral stop him free us."

"Whoa!" Brad said. " _Mistral,_ dude! That's the ship where the famous _Mistral_ Mystery took place thirty years ago!"

"Thirty?" Dipper asked, shocked. "Not—not five?"

"No, dude, it was like back in 1983, I think. They were gonna like send a whole Navy ship through some sort of dimensional portal, right? So it could, like, go from Catalina Island to Hawaii in less than a second? But it never got to Hawaii—just blinked out of existence and then a few minutes later came back, but most of the crew was dead and all the rest insane! I saw a TV show about it. Oh, they say it was just a radar experiment, but if you ask me, that's a government cover-up. And you know what the coolest thing is?"

"What?"

"The _Mistral_ is moored out in the bay, dude! You can see it from the Maritime Museum. Just go up, I think it's Harbor Drive, north from the convention center and look out to sea, and it's just moored out there. I think you can even tour it. Are you guys on some kind of quest game?"

"No," Dipper said. "No, it's just some more fans of the show, uh, messing with me."

"Bummer."

Dipper's impulse was to head up to the Maritime Museum right then—but it was past midnight, and if the patrol boat was moored out in the bay, they would have no way of getting there. At last, reluctantly, he went up to the room The girls were both sound asleep. Brad tried to talk Dipper into taking the bed, but Dipper said, "No, it's okay. I fit the loveseat, and you don't. It's comfortable for me, don't worry."

He finally got to sleep—a kind of troubled sleep, but still—some time past three.

The next morning while Brad was in the shower, Dipper conferred with Mabel and Wendy. Mabel had spent a little time online with Brad's computer, and she still was complaining about shipping. "Me and Gideon? Blaaarghh! Me and _Pacifica?_ What kind of crazy people _are_ these? Me and _Waddles_? That's just sick!"

"It's just imaginary, dude," Wendy said. "Hey, it shows you how popular you are in this world. And it's kinda creative, you have to admit. So if people want to dream about strange stuff like that, what harm are they doing—"

"You and Soos," Mabel said.

Wendy's face hardened. "I'll kill 'em all!" she said, sounding like she meant it.

"Aw, man," Mabel moaned. "Me and Dipper!"

Dipper said, "OK, OK—disgusting—but pay attention! We have to get away and out to that ship as soon as possible."

"I'll handle it," Wendy said. She reached over and closed the lid of the laptop. "Focus, Mabel."

"Okay," Mabel said. "But now I'm sorta scared about what all those people are gonna do with the pictures they took of us!"

Wendy told them her plan, and when Brad came out of the shower, she said, "Hey, man, the cops think they have my car. We're gonna go in to ID it and maybe get our stuff out if it's still in the trunk."

"I'll drive you."

"No sweat, dude, the cops are sendin' a cruiser. Tell you what, you go on over to the con—I know you have panels you want to see—and we'll try to get together later. We'll be movin' out of your room, so—thanks for everything, and have a great rest of the con, man!"

"I've already had that," Brad said. "God, I love you guys!"

"In a _nice_ way, I hope you mean," Mabel grumped.

So they left the hotel and hiked over past the Convention Center and then turned north. "Wow," Dipper said, looking at a gigantic vessel. "That's an aircraft carrier!"

Past that, and further north, and they saw other vessels moored in berths: a couple of tall sailing ships, a submarine, and then—out a little way from shore—"That's the ship in the picture," Dipper said. "The _Mistral_."

"What's that mean?" Mabel asked. "It sounds like it was on trial for murder, but the trial jury broke down or something."

"Not 'mistrial,'" Dipper said. "'Mistral.' It's French. It's the name of a wind, like the Santa Ana wind in California."

"See, Mabel?" Wendy said teasingly. "Dipper's one smart guy. That's why I love your brother."

"I hope you two are very happy together," Mabel said. 'Mabaddles.' Huh!"

"C'mon," Dipper said, hoping his hot face hadn't turned beet red. "Brad told me you can get a tour of the _Mistral."_

They found the ticket booth. The woman at the cash register said the fee was twenty-five dollars each, nonrefundable, and that there were only two tours a day. The next was at ten, about an hour away. The tour was only of the upper deck—no one was allowed to go through the ship. They all said they understood, and they bought their tickets. Wendy was handling their cash. The lady said, "Now, don't lose those, even after you go out. The boat pilot will have to collect them again to make sure we get all the tourists safe back to shore."

They found a place to get a kind of breakfast—rolls and juice, and coffee for Wendy—and waited on a bench near the place where the tour folks would ferry them out to the _Mistral._ The ticket seller had given them a brochure, and Dipper studied it. "Hm. _Mystery Vessel Mistral_. Fact or Fantasy? There's the story here of the experiment that went wrong. But it says that the experimental device was really a high-powered radar unit that malfunctioned. Brad says a lot of conspiracy theorists are convinced that's a cover story."

"And the ghost dude told you McGusset is actually on this ship?" Wendy asked.

"That's what the recorded whispers sound like they're saying. But it's hard to tell for sure."

"OK," Mabel said, "we gotta figure out some way of getting down into the ship. I'll take my grappling hook—"

"Nah," Wendy said. "I think this calls more for trickery than brute force. And I think I may have come up with a way of coverin' it. Notice how the waitin' area is fillin' up?"

It was clear that a good many of the thirty or forty people waiting for the tour were from the convention. Some were even in costumes. Wendy zeroed in on two tall, skinny guys who were wearing T-shirts with the words GRAVITY FALLS on them in big block letters, like the ones on the souvenir postcards in the Mystery Shack gift shop. "Those two guys keep, like, checkin' us out. I'm gonna talk to those dudes. You guys wave back when I wave at you."

She ambled over and both of the guys checked out her appearance, then started to talk to her in a very animated way.

"I hate them already," Dipper muttered.

"Dippendy!" Mabel said with an annoying giggle.

"Ssh."

Wendy pointed and waved, both kids smiled—Dipper really forcing it—and returned the gesture. The two boys seemed to agree to something, then Wendy sauntered back to the bench. "I got it arranged so we can stay aboard."

"How?" Dipper asked.

"Once we get out on the ship, I'm gonna pass our three tickets and a hundred bucks to Creighton, there, the one with the scruffy little chin beard. He thinks we're doing somethin' called a larp. He's gonna wait until the pilot guy gets real busy takin' the tickets as everyone returns an' slip his, his buddy Waymon's, and our tickets to him all at once. That way the ticket count comes out OK, and we can hang back and try to find a way—what is it, below decks? Down to where we're not s'posed to be, anyway."

"Wendy," Dipper said, "you worked for Grunkle Stan too long."

"Nah," she said. "Just native talent, dude. Stan never did find out that I spent some time up on the roof when I was supposedly workin'. And I mean like every day!"

Dipper mimed zipping his lip.

She grinned and did the same thing.

And then all they had to do was the hardest part:

Waiting.


	10. Chapter 10

**The Big Con**

 **Chapter 10: A Waist is a Terrible Thing to Mind**

The small—well, relatively small—boat that ferried tourists out to the _Mistral_ began to load twenty minutes before the hour. Dipper estimated that it was taking about a hundred visitors out—the ferry was a double-decker, every seat was taken, and people lined all the rails. "This is really popular," he told Mabel and Wendy.

"Eh," Mabel said, "remember, this is prob'ly like this world's Mystery Shack. Mystery Ship! Woo-woo!" She pulled her hands inside her sleeves and waved her arms, then stopped, frowning. "Why doesn't that work here? It's like my arms have a hinge at the elbow!"

They had climbed to the top deck and had seats in the stern. Even here some of the tourists pushed back through the crowds to ask for photos with them. Wendy didn't even charge—"What's the point?" she asked. "Even after paying off Creighton, we still have a stash of cash if we need it."

"Yeah," Mabel said. "It's cool. I just wish Dipper had a change of clothes along." She made a blatting sound with her tongue and pinched her nose.

"I took a shower and used a deodorant," Dipper said with as much dignity as he could muster. "This is a hot place, okay? And I think these bodies sweat more."

He leaned back for a moment and scanned their surroundings. The bay sparkled in the morning sun. It was shaping up to be a hot day, but this close to the sea there was a cooling breeze scented with salt water. It rustled the fronds of the big palms running along beside the street a hundred yards away. Out in the harbor the _Mistral_ lay motionless on its own reflection.

Just then the P.A. crackled to life: "Ladies and gentlemen, this is Michael, your captain for the brief run out to the _Mistral._ Federal and state regulations require that I make some brief safety announcements, so give me your attention."

"He sounds _adorable_!" Mabel said.

"Okay, we currently have ninety-seven passengers aboard, and there are three of us in the crew—me, Evelyn back there who'll stay on the dock, and Jamey, who'll help you up the ladder when we arrive at the _Mistral._ We have 120 life vests aboard, stored in the bins fore and aft and above you on the lower deck. Under the seats are eighty more life vests. To put them on, pull them down over your head . . . . "

He went on for about a minute, listing things they shouldn't do: "No standing on the rail."

"Sounds like fun!" Mabel said.

 _Annnnd she'll repeat that for everything_ , Dipper thought. He was right.

Finally, Captain Michael told everyone to hold on, gave the horn a blast, and Evelyn must have cast off the mooring line, because the engine came to life. The ferry slowly backed out into the calm waters of the harbor, did a graceful turn, and then picked up a little speed. Wendy looked around. "I see Creighton over by the rail," she said. "Be back in a minute, dudes."

"Creighton's kinda cute," Mabel teased as Wendy moved through the crowd.

"Don't even start," Dipper said.

Wendy was back before they reached the patrol ship, and she gave them a thumbs-up. As they pulled up to the moored _Mistral,_ the P.A. came back on: "Folks, in just a minute Jamey and I will tie up alongside the mysterious _Mistral._ Now, we're gonna board like this: First the top deck, because that's a lot shorter climb. Jamey will go up there to help you up. It's just a few steps up a ladder from the top deck, port side of the stern—that's the left side for you landlubbers. I'm gonna ask anybody who needs special help in climbing ladders, or anybody with children under eight, to wait for the end of the line. Don't worry, we'll all have plenty of time to see the sights. When we get aboard the mystery patrol boat, we'll split into two groups. I'll lead one, Jamey the other one. It's the exact same tour, so don't worry about which group you'll be with . . . ."

They came alongside the patrol ship, maneuvered a little, and finally Dipper saw that the ladder was a lot like the ones in swimming pools—two big loops at the top and only four treads to climb before you were on the ship's deck. When Jamey, an overweight, bored-looking teen guy with spectacular acne, came up from the lower deck and unhooked the safety ropes blocking the exit, everyone crowded over to the ladder. Wendy held them back until they could slip into line just ahead of a slow-moving elderly couple. "Now, dudes," she said.

Jamey was standing by the ladder. "Grab the rails, hold on, watch your step," he droned over and over. Mabel climbed up first, then Dipper, and Wendy came last. She paused and told Jamey, "Hey, man, I think the old couple behind us needs some help."

Jamey leaned over and held out his hand for the lady. "Grab hold, ma'am."

Wendy nudged Dipper. "He's distracted. That buys us a little time. C'mon."

The others who had gone before them were up at midships, bunched around a big plaque with "The Legend of the _Mistral"_ written out in sun-faded letters. Wendy led them around the stern, past the elevated helicopter-landing pad—and then they were on the other side, out of sight of the newcomers from the ferry—and she said, "Now we gotta find a place to hide, quick."

"Up there," Dipper said, pointing up toward the bridge. A sizable lifeboat hung from two davits.

They climbed up the two ladders as quietly as they could. "Yes!" Wendy said, pumping the air. "Good spot, Dip!" A canvas tarpaulin covered the lifeboat. She loosened it, boosted Mabel in, helped Dipper scramble up, and then pulled herself up and in. She pulled the tarp back into shape, squeezing her hand down between tarp and hull to tighten the lines. "That should do it."

"It's kinda hot," Mabel complained.

"Yeah, but the tour only lasts forty-five minutes, so tough it out, girl," Wendy said. They lay on their backs in the dim light that filtered down through the canvas. It smelled like the inside of a tent on a hot day. And like very old fish. And sweat. They talked in whispers.

Dipper said, "Man, I hope we can find McGusset. And that he can help us with the ghost's request. And that we can get back home."

"I dunno," Wendy murmured. "If we're like stuck here in this world, there are advantages. It's nice to have an actual figure."

"Yeah, I bet Dipper thinks so, too," Mabel said. "Ow! Don't punch me so hard!"

"Sorry, accident, it's crowded," Dipper said sarcastically. More thoughtfully, he added, "Usually when a ghost is released from its haunting, things go right again. Like in the Northwest mansion, when Pacifica let the townspeople in. I mean, Mabel, Candy, and Grenda and I were all _wood,_ but we went back to normal—"

"AB-normal in Dip's case," Mabel added.

"Shh!" Wendy warned.

From outside the lifeboat came the shuffling sound of tourist feet and Jamey speaking loudly: "Now, here is the bridge that's the command center this is just a little ship it had a crew of about seventy-five normal complement it served in the China sea during the Vietnam war now come along through the bridge, take a look but don't touch the controls take your pictures this way, we're walking we're walking."

"Twenty-five dollars is _high_ for this, man," Wendy whispered.

"Wonder if there's a gift shop," Mabel whispered back. "Hey, if there is and we're stuck here, you could get a job there."

"We are _not_ stuck," Dipper insisted. "You'll see." _I hope,_ he added mentally.

Ten minutes later Captain Michael led another group past, repeating exactly the same spiel, but with a little more expression. Then quiet for many more minutes. "Think they're gone?" Mabel asked. "I gotta get a breath of air."

"I'll take a look," Wendy said. She slipped out of the lifeboat and was away for a few minutes. Dipper and Mabel heard an engine start up, and then Wendy pulled the tarp up. "Okay, guys, coast is clear."

"Hah!" Mabel laughed. "Coast."

Dipper, climbing out of the lifeboat, mumbled, "It wasn't a joke." He dropped to the deck and then helped Mabel down.

"We're in luck, guys," Wendy said. "I was like layin' on my stomach on the top deck on the port side lookin' down at them—they couldn't see me—and I heard Jamey tell Captain Michael—"

"He's hunky, isn't he?" Mabel asked. "I can tell from his voice that he's hunky."

"Well . . ." Wendy said, "no. He's a little bit like your Grunkle Stan, about sixty-five I guess—hard to tell with these people—big fat belly, thick glasses, gray hair, bald on top, ugly face."

"Aww, you have punctured my dreams," Mabel whispered.

"ANYway," Wendy said, "Jamey told him the count was good, and Michael asked him had he taken McGusset's supplies to him and Jamey said no, but he would, and I watched until Jamey came back aboard with a bag and went around back and then partway forward and headed down a ladder, so I know which way to go. And Jamey came up an' went back an' the ferry's gone now, so come with me."

The ladder—companionway, Dipper thought it was supposed to be called—was near the stern, next to the elevated helipad, on the starboard side—the side shielded from a shore view. They went down to a badly-lighted landing. In front of them was a hatch, a vertical one, with a central spoked wheel instead of a handle.

"Hope it's not locked," Dipper said. He turned it counterclockwise. Something clacked, he opened the door—and they heard eighties music floating out from somewhere. "We're in!" They stepped into a corridor that ran side to side.

"I smell pizza," Mabel said.

"Track it down, girl," Wendy urged her.

Mabel, nose in the air, sniffed her way down the very narrow corridor, past two other closed hatches, and finally pointed to one on the far side that opened toward the stern. The music was louder now—no song that any of them had ever heard, probably a big hit on this world at one time—and they found the hatch was open. Dipper stepped through—all the hatch openings were small, so that even Dipper and Mabel had to step up over a high threshold and stoop at the same time to avoid banging their heads—and they saw a figure sitting at a table, back to them, munching on a pizza slice while tapping on a computer keyboard with his other hand. On this level they could hear some kind of machinery going, a steady low thrum.

Dipper cleared his throat. "Dr. McGusset?"

"Yipe!" The man sprang up and spun around.

He was _sort_ of like McGucket. White hair, bushy white beard—short, though, and no bandage on it—big nose, big eyes behind heavy glasses, but—

He was immense. A round ball of a man. He looked at them in absolute befuddlement, then said, "Tourists! Dagnabbit, this is the second time in ten years! This is gettin' to be too much! Scat!"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," Dipper said, holding up his hands. "Listen, we didn't come just to stick our noses into your business. Admiral D.D. Skipper sent us!"

"Hornswoggle it, I'm so close to solvin' this if people'd just let me—what? Who? _Who_ sent you?"

"Uh, Admiral D.D. Skipper. Short guy? Very craggy face? Rich?"

McGusset sat down again in his swivel chair, which screeched under his weight. "D.D. Skipper?" he asked, scratching his bald head. "You—you saw D.D. Skipper? Impossible! Where did you see him?"

"In Gravity Falls," Dipper said.

"Gravity F—what? It's real? And D.D. Skipper's in—let me get my head around this."

"Meanwhile," Mabel said, "Can we have some of your pizza?"

"Huh? Oh, sure, help yourself." He sounded embarrassed when he added, "I didn't useta be so fat. Spendin' all my time on this ship, no exercise, nothin' to do but eat an' sleep an' keep things a-goin'. I jest don't have no inclination to watch my weight." He broke off and squinted suspiciously. "Hold on a fiddlefaddle minute, though. You-all can't be from Gravity Falls. You look nothin' like the pictures of the humany creatures that lives there."

"Our bodies changed when we crossed over to this world," Dipper said.

Wendy pulled a picture from her wallet. "'S true, dude," she said, handing the photo to McGusset. "This is me 'n my brothers. Check it out."

McGusset took the photo and stared at it, his hands trembling. He looked from the picture to Wendy and back again. "Oh, my God," he whispered. "All this time—and you actually saw and talked to D.D.?"

"Yump," Mabel said through a mouthful of mozzarella and pepperoni.

"And he sent you—to me?"

Dipper rubbed the back of his neck. "Well, not exactly. See, he called us in because his house outside of Gravity Falls was being haunted by a ghost. I think it was the ghost of a sailor who died aboard this ship. The ghost led us to you."

McGusset's voice was shaky: "Here all these years I thought them voices in the night was just bad dreams, or in my head."

He handed Wendy's photos back and slumped in his swivel chair, his plump hands clutched between his fat knees. He stared downward, shaking his head.

"Uh, sir?" Dipper said. "The ghost—or maybe more than one of them—has a message for you." He took out his camera and called up the reversed audio file that Brad had saved to it. He set it to play.

The creepy plea that started "Help us" played first.

McGusset leaned back, gasping for air. "Stop the experiment? Is that what they're askin'?"

"Yeah," Dipper said. "We're pretty sure."

"Have I been wrong?" the old man muttered miserably. "I thought that by keeping' the field generator going' all these years I was given' them a chance to come back. But—they're really truly dead an' can't leave the space between dimensions? Can't go to their rest, can't find their way to the great beyond? Lord forgive me, have I been holdin' them back? That's horrible!"

"I think it will be over if you just shut down the experiment," Dipper said. "That'll set things right."

But McGusset shook his head. "I dunno. If you're lyin' to me, or if they're not for-real dead—oh, I jest gotta think about this. You'll have to stay with me until I figger things out."

"Dude," Wendy said, "we want to _help_ you, that's all. We don't want to be your guests."

"Oh, not my guests," McGusset said. "I'm afraid you-all are my prisoners."


	11. Chapter 11

**The Big Con**

 **Chapter 11: "Trust Me"**

McGusset gathered them all in a small lounge, a single round porthole letting in a little light from the west. It was comfortable enough, except for its size—smaller even than Grunkle Stan's TV parlor in the Mystery Shack. Its furnishings were as meager: one wall of bookshelves crammed with paperback science-fiction novels, a small round coffee table spread with electronics magazines and physics journals, a TV with a strangely flat screen, an armchair big enough for McGusset's girth, and a small sofa on which Mabel, Dipper, and Wendy were crowded together. The overhead light burned in a kind of wire cage. All in all, it looked nearly like a prison cell.

Wendy looked furious. "Hey, man, you can't keep us here if we don't want to stay!" she said. "You just try and keep us your prisoners!"

McGusset looked worried. "I probably couldn't stop you," he said. "Let's face it, I'm in terrible shape. You-all're my prisoners only because there's not any easy way for you to leave—leastways, not until four this afternoon, when there's another tour. And if I ask them to arrest you, they'll do it. Technically you-all're trespassing." When Wendy started to object, he raised his hands to ask for silence. "But I don't intend to do that. I jest need some time t'think it out—and some more information. Tell me again, bein' specific, just how you-all come to be here."

So the three kids went through the whole story. McGusset repeated their names: "Dipper Pines, Mabel Pines. Wendy Corduroy. And you-all are really from that other reality, y' say? Tell me about th' trip here one more time, please. All the detail you can recollect." Again McGusset had them describe the Admiral. He found a photo and said, "Are you right sure of your man, now? Does this look like him?"

They studied it. Wendy said, "Well, it does and it doesn't, y'know? It's like that photo of me and my brothers. I mean, I know I don't look like that _now._ Like Dip says, our bodies somehow changed so's we look like you guys now. I mean, five fingers—freaky! Usually in Gravity Falls you don't get all five 'til you're like an adult."

"But this could be a version of the Admiral," Dipper said. "He's not wearing an admiral's uniform here."

"D.D. was a captain when that was took."

Dipper stared at the picture. "Features are the same, but—I don't know, rounder-looking. More solid somehow. See, the basic features don't change. At the Con all the fans of the show knew we were who we are—well, they thought we were cosplaying."

When McGusset looked confused, Mabel put in helpfully, "Cosplaying is when people dress up like their favorite characters from some book or TV show or movie. Except I saw one guy who was supposed to be Bill Cipher, but he was just in a yellow suit and top hat. He looked nothing like a nacho chip."

"Look, look," Dipper said, holding up his brown bangs. "See? See this birthmark? I have the same birthmark in Gravity Falls."

"It's real?" McGusset asked. "Not make-up?"

"Not make-up," Dipper said. "I've always had this in my world, and I have it here. The Big Dipper."

"Which is how he got his name, 'cause he hates his real name. It's M-"

"Not important, Mabel!" Dipper said.

"But why? Nobody here will ever tell anybody from Gravity Falls. Why can't I say—"

"Because if you do, I'll explain _shipping_!"

Wendy stepped in: "Cool it, Mabes."

"Okay," she said, crossing her arms and frowning.

"Look, Dr. McGusset," Dipper said, "are you convinced that we do know Admiral D.D. Skipper?"

"What's the D.D. stand for?" Mabel asked.

Absently, McGusset replied, "Captain Skipper? Dee Dee. On account of his parents wanted a girl."

Mabel made an explosive sound, a badly-covered laugh. "Oh, man, and I thought _Dip_ had it bad!"

As if he hadn't heard, McGusset went on, "I'm forced to say that you-all must have met Captain Skipper. Or a version of him, I reckon. That's surprisin'. You see, not everybody in the real world has an equivalent in the Gravity Falls universe."

"Uh, 'scuse me?" Wendy said. "Gravity Falls is _in_ the real universe, dude."

"Well, yeah, I 'spect it seems so to you-all. Anyways, what first set me off onto workin' on a teleportation was a viewer that I built in college. I was lookin' for an instantaneous way of transmittin' and receivin' images and sound. Radio waves only go at the speed of light, y'know. Fast enough fer ordinary transmissions, but imagine an interstellar spaceship a hundred light-years from Earth. It'd take a hundred years for a radio call from them to reach us, an' another hundred for th' reply to get back to them. Anyways, when I tested my transmitter-receiver out, I got glimpses of strange worlds. I thought at first I was lookin' at other places in our galaxy, but then after a while and a lot of viewin', it became plain that whole other laws of physics applied in some of 'em. I wasn't lookin' across the universe, but plumb out of it."

"Oh," Mabel said. "That's why when I stuff my grappling hook inside my sweater here it's all bulgy and heavy instead of just sort of disappearing until I need it?"

"Yeah," McGusset agreed. "That's what some people call hammerspace. In our world it don't exist but in cartoons. When a cartoon character needs a great big sledgehammer, he reaches behind him, and there it is, out o' nowhere. In your world, I guess it lets you store stuff like your grapplin' hook—"

"Or my axe," Wendy said, pulling it from its sheath.

"Right, or your axe—why you even _got_ an axe?"

"I live in the woods," she said. "Plus my dad's a lumberjack."

"Oh, well, that kinda makes sense. But—a grapplin' hook?"

"Every girl should have one," Mabel said firmly.

"Well, maybe you got a point. Where was I? Oh, yeah, I got glimpses of your world in my viewer all that time ago. Forty-odd years now. I even saw a sign that said 'Welcome to Gravity Falls.' An' I recognized a few faces, not many, but two or three over th' years who looked like caricatures of people I knew in th' real—in our world, I mean. There's a kind of echo of our worlds in each other, though it don't work all the time, I think. But how in th' blue-eyed blazes did your Capt—I mean Admiral Skipper know anything about our world?"

"Maybe he's like us, but in reverse," Dipper suggested. "Maybe he got pulled through the dimensions and wound up in Gravity Falls, with his body changed to look like people there."

McGusset sighed. "Naw, I can't buy that. I'd like to, but—well, the fact is—uh." He broke off and looked distressed. "See, Skipper was an old friend of mine from way back. His family is really rich on our earth. Mine was poor. But after college I went on to serve four years in the Navy. He was just a lieutenant then, and I was a communications and information warrant officer. But we talked each other's language, y' might say, liked the same books, had the same kinda wild ideas. When my hitch was up, I went into computers in civilian life, but Skipper an' I kept in touch. Back in '80 he called me an' told me about this theoretical teleportation idea an' asked if I'd come in as a special consultant. I did, I wound up designin' the tech, an' he was gonna be th' information officer. He was a Captain by then."

McGusset levered his bulk up from the chair and paced—three steps forward, three back in the small stateroom. "Guess you know how it turned out. Him an' me, we weren't on th' ship. We were in an observation vessel a hundred yards off. Time come for th' experiment to begin, an' somethin' went bad haywire. Purple flickerin' light. We could see sailors jumpin' off the _Mistral._ Heard horrible screams. Skipper told me to try to get th' thing under control. While I worked on the tech, he took a launch an' went over single-handed to help out best he could. Then there was a tremendous explosion, only with no sound—an' then nothin'. Jest th' ship rockin' there empty."

"That sounds horrible," Mabel said.

"It was, gal. The observation boat went over an' picked up seventeen sailors, all of them burned, all of 'em out of their minds and babblin'. Got on the ship. The trans-dimensional generator was cyclin' on low-standby. Nobody livin' on the ship. All we found were dead, their bodies mangled. But we could jest account for thirteen that way. Thirteen or maybe fourteen. I mean _bad_ mangled. Anyways, forty-five of the crew, includin' all the officers, were missin'. So was Skipper. I never see him again. That was in spring of 1982, and I never see him from that day to this."

He sank back into the chair. "Aw, man. My hope was, these missin' sailors might be hung up in th' Between. I wanted to pull 'em out if I could, right what I done wrong. But if these here voices are theirs—I don't know. I just don't know." When he looked up, his eyes gleamed with unspilled tears. "This Admiral Skipper, yours I mean—he never mentioned me?"

Dipper teetered on the edge of a lie. _If I say yes, maybe McGusset will listen to us!_ But seeing the man's miserable face, he said, "Honestly, no, sir, he didn't. But—but I think he meant for us to follow the ghost. I think somehow he knew we might—might wind up here, where we could get in touch with you."

"Dude," Wendy said, "Dipper didn't tell you this, but dig it: We, like, materialized in your old warehouse. Had your name on it and everything."

"My big workshop," McGusset mused. "Up in th' hills. They haven't torn it down?"

"Still there," Dipper said. "But the electricity's turned off. Everything's chained up. It's all empty."

"All empty. Huh. The last of my equipment was prob'ly taken out by the Navy. I kept a back-up generator goin' there in case the one on the _Mistral_ broke down. In fact, I moved it onto th' _Mistral_ after she was decommissioned. Th' Captain's estate bought the ship an' moored it here. I asked if I could get th' job of watchman an' caretaker, an' since I'd been a friend of Captain Skipper's and worked real cheap, I got it. Moved my spare generator out here—they'd took apart the one we'd used. Built a replacement, an' that's the one runnin' right this minute, and I also built another backup, it's on th' ship too. So my keepin' one of them goin' for thirty-odd years has got th' sailors and my old friend hung up. That what you're tellin' me?"

Dipper said, "Sir, I'm being completely honest here. I don't know _what_ I'm saying. I only know that the—ghosts, the spirits, the entities, whatever, that are trapped and can't find their way need you to turn off the machine. That's what they begged us to do. I think that's what the Admiral wants you to do, too."

McGusset nodded miserably. "Had to have been two of 'em. My Skipper was jest a Captain when he bought it. But maybe—there's a kind o' resonance, y'know. Maybe your Admiral has some of my Captain in him." He lowered his gaze for a minute or so. Then he looked up and said, "Come with me. You can see it."

They followed him down another companionway—he barely fit the narrow space—and into a room from which the low thrumming sound came. It smelled acrid, like electricity and something burning slow and steadily. An array of computers, without monitors, stood in ranks twenty wide and three high on shelves across the width of the compartment. A metal table along a second wall held six monitors, three of them on. The three gave different readouts and showed sine-wave graphs, green and red and squirming like snakes.

The rest of the room was taken up by a cobbled-together looking conglomeration of parts and electronics. It produced the hum—or half of it did. The other half was cold and silent. "That's th' backup," McGusset explained. "It kicks on, off its own power, if the other'n acts up. Never has so far, though. I test the backup once a week."

"What happens if you turn the main machine off?" Dipper asked.

"That's jest it, boy. God knows. The field will collapse—you ain't aware of it because it's beyond human sensory detection, but there's a durn powerful trans-electromagnetic field pulsing through the whole ship. I turn the machines off, the field collapses in on itself—an' then—well, I don't know. It may be the men who vanished will come back into existence, alive and well and the same age as they were thirty and more years ago. Or they could show up, age instantly, an' die horrible deaths. Or if they're truly lost in th' Between space they might get released an' find their way to their eternal rest at last. Or—nothin' at all. I don't know. I ain't been able to find the mathematics to predict an outcome."

"Try it."

McGusset stared at a console. "All I have to do," he said, "Is throw the switch on that control. It'd shut it all down. But I'm scared. I don't know what-all will happen, boy. But I'm pretty sure that anybody who's still on this ship has a good chance of not survivin'."

"But we can't leave," Mabel said. "We're your prisoners."

"Naw, naw, I take that back. I release you," McGusset said. "When the next tour comes this afternoon, you-all can get on the ferry. I'll fix it for you. Late tonight, when you-all're safe ashore—I'll cut th' power."

"No," Dipper said.

"What?"

Dipper took a deep breath. "If that happens—if the field collapses and we're not inside it—I don't think we can ever get back to our own world, sir. I'm pretty sure we have to be here so we can go back through the Between or whatever it is. We went through one glowing portal thing on our world to get here. We have to be wherever on this side the one will open to return."

"You got nothin' to back that," McGusset said.

"One thing," Dipper said. "We've been there before."

McGusset looked at all three of them. Wendy stepped up and put her hand on Dipper's shoulder. Mabel gripped his hand in hers.

"You all feel that-a way?" McGusset asked.

"Yeah," Wendy said. "What Dipper said goes for us, too."

"We have to be together," Mabel said very softly. Then, in a choked voice, she said, "Dipper, I'm sorry I've been bugging you so much. It's just—I've been trying to hide it, but I'm so scared!"

"Mabel," Dipper said with a smile, "never stop bugging me! You wouldn't be you if you did!" To McGusset, he said, "We want to be here when it happens. Shut it down, Mr. McGusset."

The fat hand hovered over the control. "I got so much on m'conscience already—I jest don't know."

"Trust me," Dipper said.

McGusset closed his eyes. He closed his fingers on the switch. Then, barely whispering, he said, "I trust you, Dipper Pines," and cut the power.

Mabel said, "Hey! He's cosplaying m—"

And in a brilliant purple flash, the world went away.


	12. Chapter 12

**The Big Con**

 **Chapter 12: All Together Now**

 **From the Journals of Dipper Pines:**

. . . _I actually can't describe it. The first part is the worst, when you have no sense of yourself at all and everything is gray and empty. You can't feel, hear, smell, taste, or touch anything. There is nothing but your awareness. I think it feels like death . . . ._

* * *

Slowly, gradually, almost painfully, sensation returned to Dipper: Wendy clutched his right arm tightly, and he could feel the pressure. Mabel pressed his left hand. The monotone gray almost imperceptibly broke up into darker and lighter patches, shapeless and roiling, like being tumbled in a gigantic clothes dryer with wads of poofy lint. Then somehow—it seemed more like telepathy than speech, and not Gideon Gleeful's fake telepathy either, but the real thing—somehow they communicated.

Wendy: _Dipper? You OK, man?_

Dipper: _I'm good. Mabel?_

Mabel: _I'm so scared! Don't let go! Don't leave me!_

Dipper: _I'll never let go, Sis. And I won't leave you!_

Wendy: _We got your back, Mabes. Hang on and tough it out, girl._

Other presences now swirled and flowed around them, only dimly perceived at first: shimmering, pulsating near-human shapes, pale blue, barely lighter than the fog around them. Were they moving, gliding all in the same direction? If so, Dipper thought, so were he and the other two kids. Did the specters have a goal? Were they just drifting, or were they purposefully heading—somewhere?

Mabel: _Look at that, guys! They're—they're splitting up and re-making themselves. Like jigsaw puzzles!_

Dipper saw now that they were doing exactly that, and he realized something: the weird, disjointed ghost they had first seen might actually be—a composite?—a blend? It might have been made up of pieces of many _different_ ghosts, somehow assembled to make one more-or-less complete apparition whose parts didn't hang together right.

Because now from a cloud of . . . of human pieces, the shapes were attracting things, a hand here, a head there, a leg over yonder. And they were becoming complete human forms, sorting out the jumble. And yes, he could see now that they were heading toward a faint distant swirling whirlpool of blue light . . . their way out of the Between.

 _But not ours!_ Dipper became aware that he and the girls were taking a different direction, passing the parade, sailing for some other destination as yet unseen.

Then he actually heard Wendy's voice. "Dude! We got a guide! Check it out!"

Without even knowing how he did it, Dipper spun in mid-flight, dragging Mabel with him. Yes, now they were behind a floating human-shape, featureless in the mists, but whole and unified, and it was beckoning them, urging them on, waving.

"I can sorta see now," Mabel said. "Wowie wow! My hand is back to normal!"

"Our bodies changed again. That means we're going back home," Dipper said, hoping, almost praying, that it was true.

And yes, he glimpsed another revolving blue oval floating ahead, and their guide seemed to stop and hang in mid-air. The kids swept past the shimmery ghost, accelerating, and as they did, in all their minds they heard a kind of eerie faint voice: _Fair winds and a following sea._

"We're goin' fast now! Get ready, dudes!"

Following Wendy's advice, Dipper tried to stay loose and prepared to roll with the landing, but they shot through too quickly—they all tumbled out—

They flew out of the portal with a crash and a clatter in the hallway of Admiral Skipper's house. The small table still stood there with the three unburning candles and the incantation resting on it. The Admiral stood in the same spot as he had when their trip began. The only difference was that the hall light was on again.

They hit the carpet hard. Wendy took it best, tucking and rolling. Dipper and Mabel just flopped loosely and somersaulted without meaning to, knocking over the table with a bang and a scatter of candles. Dipper lost his hold on Mabel's hand, got on hands and knees to scramble over to her, and asked, "Are you OK?"

"Uh—yeah, I think so," Mabel said, sitting up and rubbing her forehead. "Ouchie. Hey, look, something's wrong with the Admiral!"

Behind them, the shimmering blue light still hung suspended in air, flaring, flickering, as if it were about to wink out of existence. Standing before it, both arms outspread, Admiral Skipper twitched and jerked like a badly-operated marionette. Then something transparently blue burst out of his body and seemed to be sucked into the vortex—and the blue oval imploded, soundlessly, with a final cold flare of white light.

"It's—it's over," the Admiral gasped, leaning against the wall. "Thank God, it's finally over!"

Dogget was suddenly there at the old man's elbow. "You need to sit down, sir. This way." Offering the Admiral the support of his arm, Dogget jerked his head at the kids, who were just getting to their feet. They followed, not to the more distant sitting room, but into the dining room. Dogget pulled out a chair for the Admiral and helped him sit down. He nodded at the other three, and they sat, too.

"Cool," Wendy said as she leaned back and squirmed. "Now my axe is back to normal. I can't even feel it hangin' there until I reach for it."

Mabel patted her shooting-star sweater, grinning. "Hammerspace!" She reached inside the sweater and like magic produced her favorite tool. "Grappling hook!"

Dogget had brought the General a tall glass of water. The old man was breathing hard, and he took a long, grateful drink. "That took a lot out of me," he wheezed. But he mustered a faint smile and added, "Literally."

"Admiral," Dipper said, "I think I know what happened. I saw a ghost come out of you. Something like that once happened to me, too, I mean a spirit possessed my body, except it was a kind of interdimensional demon. It wasn't your own spirit that went through the vortex, was it? It was kind of . . . kind of a double."

"Yes," the Admiral said. "You've been to—to the other Earth, I guess? The other dimension?"

"Yeah, Admiral dude," Wendy said. "And let me tell you, man, it is messed up."

Skipper nodded wearily. "So I gather. Do you want the full truth? I couldn't tell you earlier. Not as long as _he_ shared my body. There are . . . rules, I suppose you'd say, that ghosts can't break." He took a deep breath. "I'm not young any more. I'll make this short as I can."

He told them that the problem began in 1982. Actually, almost nothing of his former story had been true, at least not in this dimension, where there had been no experiment with the _Mistral_ at all, although he had served aboard the small vessel as a Commander and then in a later tour of duty as a Captain. But in 1982, when he was still a Captain himself, Skipper had experienced, well, the first symptoms of some bizarre disorder. After briefly passing out—fortunately, he said, in his quarters and not on the bridge of his vessel—he started to experience bizarre symptoms. He had thoughts that he didn't believe were his own. He recalled vivid memories of things he knew had never happened. He fought them, covered them up, hung in for a few years until he had just gained his promotion to Rear Admiral, and then . . . one day he lost control completely.

"I became mentally incompetent," he said. "Hopelessly confused, losing all my concentration, unable to function. During my more lucid moments I really thought I'd lost my mind. Had myself committed for treatment. Didn't work, because it turned out I wasn't really crazy. But then gradually I, well, I suppose you'd say I came to terms with my visitor. We worked out internally a way for me to understand him and vice-versa. I learned he was terrified and until he adjusted, his fears and his bafflement at where he was made normal life impossible for me. Even after he calmed down, I found that just behaving normally was most difficult."

The Captain Skipper from the other Earth had somehow burst through the dimensional barrier to merge with his near-twin in the Gravity Falls world. "I could communicate with him in my mind, remember," the Admiral said. "I had his memories, or most of them. But he couldn't make sense of time any longer. Five years after my mental troubles began, I learned to pass for sane and was released from the mental hospital. But of course my naval career was finished, and I had to retire years before I'd planned to do so. As for my . . . passenger, let's call the Captain that for now, well, since he wasn't really concerned with Earthly time any longer, to him the accident had always happened 'five years ago.' Never changed, no matter how many years passed for me."

"So—who were we talking to when you called us in about the ghost?" Dipper asked. "You or him?"

"A mixture of the two of us. Sometimes one, sometimes the other. That's why I've become a recluse, more or less. People who are around me any length of time think I'm schizophrenic."

"Now they won't," Mabel said. In a soft, sad voice, she added, "The other one, the Captain—he's dead, isn't he?"

"Yes, he is," the Admiral said. "He died trying to help his men. Not such a bad way to go. I like to think that if I were in a similar situation, I'd risk it all, too. We weren't exactly alike, mind you, but he was—he was as good a man as I hope I'd be in a life-or-death situation."

"And the first ghost we saw, the one who opened the portal?" Dipper asked.

"Not one ghost. Parts of all his dead shipmates. They couldn't communicate with this world—I suppose they had no close kin, no counterparts in this world, as the Captain and I did. They knew where the Captain had gone, though, and they repeatedly tried to contact him. They learned that only by working together as a team could they muster the power to break through the barrier between worlds and guide you to the other Earth to do what had to be done to free them."

"We met a scientist named McGusset," Dipper said. "I'm sure he has a counterpart here, because we know the man, but their lives weren't really anything alike."

"I believe from what the Captain learned of this universe that the two worlds are only partially parallel. I think the ties between personalities have to be extraordinarily close for an actual exchange to work—unless you have a guide, as the three of you did. But you didn't seem to exchange with or possess anyone on the other Earth. You were yourselves, weren't you?"

"Well, kind of," Dipper said. "Actually, there's a cartoon show over there that's based on our lives, I think. And a fan of that show told me that the creator of it is a guy who has a twin sister and a grandfather who was a lot like our Grun—I mean grand-uncle Stan. But we didn't go into those twins' bodies. We just wound up with versions that looked like ourselves, but different, too, 'cause the humans over there are built weird."

"It was way freaky," Wendy said. "We even had more fingers an' everything. Hey!" she reached into her jeans pocket and pulled out a crumple of cash. "Look at these. Over there these things can actually buy things!"

"They don't even look like real money now," Mabel said.

"Never did, Mabes. And I guess they're not usable, here on this side. Prob'ly shoulda left 'em with Bradford. Man, these bills are strange-lookin', right? I got one hundred-dollar bill left. Check it out!"

"Oh!" Mabel said. " _Their_ Benjamin Franklin really _was_ a guy! How weird is _that?_ I wonder if their guy version was as much of a do-good as our woman version in the real world."

"Sir, do you know what happened to McGusset?" Dipper asked. "He turned off the generator that kept all the ghosts trapped in what he called the Between. He said it would be dangerous to be inside the generator field when he did that—but he stayed just the same to send us back. Maybe he even died, but he didn't seem to be in the Between with us. And I don't think he wound up among the ghosts because we saw them going through a portal, I guess to the Great Beyond or somewhere, and nobody his shape was with them. But did he make it or—or not?"

"There are some things we'll never know," the Admiral said. "We'll talk about this more if you want, later on, maybe tomorrow. But I'm worn out. I have to sleep."

"Is this like the same night, still?" Wendy asked.

"Only a few minutes went by from the time you left to the time you returned," Dogget said. "Five at the most."

Wendy leaned back in her chair. "Whoa! We spent days over there! Now my mind is, like, totally blown." She mimed a head explosion. "Boosh!"

"Before I do get to bed," the Admiral said, "there's the matter of a reward. Let me pay you for ending my long trouble. Dogget, bring me the checkbook."

Dipper said, "Uh—Wendy, could you and Mabel go wait in the car? I need to work this out with the Admiral."

"Okay," Mabel said. "But remember Grunkle Stan's motto: No Refunds!"

"Hey, dude, anything you agree on is fine with me," Wendy said. "Even if it's nothing!"

When the girls had left, Dipper leaned on the table. "Sir, I don't want your money. I think taking it would, oh, I don't know . . . make what we did seem cheap? Even dishonor the sailors we tried to help? Does that make any sense at all?"

"It does to me," the Admiral said softly, with a sad smile. "It does to me, my boy."

"But if you really want to reward us," Dipper said, "There is something you could do . . . ."


	13. Chapter 13

**The Big Con**

 **Chapter 13: A Bunch of Stuff that Happened**

 _ **Following the events of Dipper, Mabel, and Wendy's expedition to exorcise the ghost, these things happened. Not at the same time, not in the same place, not even in this order, and not even in the same universes, but still . . . . they happened.**_

 _ **Gravity Falls, early morning, the day after the travelers returned:**_

The growing dawn had turned the morning mists silver when Wendy stopped her car in the parking lot of the Mystery Shack next to Grunkle Stan's classic '65 El Diablo convertible. They sat for a moment, and Mabel asked her brother, "So what did Grunkle Ford say on the phone?"

"Well, he was a little surprised, because I called so late. So early in the morning, I guess, really."

"I'll bet Grunkle Stan was grouchy!" Mabel said. "Grouch-grouch-grouch-grouch!"

"Uh, they both were a little upset. Soos had called to see if we were over there, and I think everybody's been waiting up for us. They'd been calling my cell phone, but we weren't in range. Grunkle Ford was about to call again when I got him on the line instead."

"Is he like mad at us?" Wendy asked.

"Not really! He's excited that we went to the other universe. He's never talked much about his own adventures in other dimensions, but I think this'll open him up!"

"Well," Mabel said, "we have to face them sooner or later. Let's do it."

The three kids climbed out of the car. "Looks like they're waitin' up for us, all right," Wendy said. The Mystery Shack blazed with light.

Soos, Melody, and Abuelita were all sleepy-eyed in bathrobes and were in the parlor, drinking coffee. They said their hellos, Melody made sure they were all in one piece and all right, Abuelita insisted they take a glass of orange juice each ("It have lots of Vitamin C"), and Soos told them, "The Pines dudes are waiting for you in the dining room, guys. Uh, I think they want to like have some words with you? We'll give you a little privacy, huh?"

"Thanks Soos," Dipper said. They high-fived.

Then Wendy, Mabel, and Dipper found the two Stans in the dining room, sitting at the table, mugs of coffee steaming in front of them. "Here ya are, ya ingrates," Stanley said. "Out all night long, scarin' the heck outa your friends, what were ya _thinkin_ '? What's this cockamamie story ya told my brother?"

"It's true, Grunkle Stan!" Mabel said. "A guy called us over because his house was haunted! We went after the ghost and wound up in this really weird dimension where we're all famous!"

Stanford, sitting at the end of the table, chuckled. "Famous? I hardly think that likely," he said. "The odds against another dimension knowing anything at all about this one are astronomical."

"It's true, though!" Wendy insisted. "It was crazy uncomfortable. Even the gravity felt different, heavier somehow. There was, like, no way for me to carry my axe without it digging into me. And the _guys_ there were even worse than the ones in high school for hittin' on me."

Dipper glowered. "But," he said loudly, "aside from all that, Grunkle Ford, we freed not just one ghost but dozens of them. I mean we gave them peace! We did what we had to do. And we even ran into the other dimension's version of Fiddleford!"

"He's enormous!" Mabel interjected.

"Well," Ford said with an indulgent smile, "whatever you did, it certainly sounds as if you had a great adventure. High five!"

Dipper started the slap, then froze with his hand in mid-air. "Wait—wait a minute. You have five fingers!"

Ford looked at his hand. "Well, yes. I've had them all my life, Dipper. What's wrong? Have you forgotten that Stanley has polydactyly, not I?"

" _Whaaat?_ "

Stanley Pines waggled six fingers at his grand-nephew. "Yeah, I'm the weird one. Ya forget?"

Wendy gasped. "OMG, dudes! We're in the wrong dimension!"

Dipper and Mabel grabbed each other: "Ahhhhhhh!"

And Stanford Pines broke up laughing—but in Stanley Pines's voice. "Ah-hah! Gotcha! I told my nerdy brother we could swap clothes and give you knuckleheads a good scare for stayin' out all night and worryin' Soos an' Melody half to death!"

"How was my impression of Stanley?" asked Stanley—who, Dipper realized now that he'd dropped the pretense, was actually Stanford.

"Uh—good, man, really . . . really good," Dipper said with an embarrassed smile.

"Awww!" Mabel said elbowing her brother, "How cute! They're cosplaying each other!"

Then the kids had to explain "cosplaying." Along with a great many other things. And when they had finished, Ford gave them all a high six.

 _ **The Other Earth, some broiling-hot Wednesday in some July, 2:12 pm, in the parking lot of a restaurant just off I-20 near Benbrook, Texas:**_

A sleepy Brad Begman had just pulled in to get lunch. He was on his way home to Cordele, Georgia, and had been driving since having breakfast in Las Cruces, New Mexico, at roughly 5:00 am. He'd driven across two more time zones now. Except for two bathroom stops, he hadn't even stretched his legs in the intervening hours.

He was starving. He climbed out of the van, stretched, then went around to the passenger's side and opened the door to let his driving partner out. He intended to carry it into the restaurant with him and set it on the table. People were sure to notice them together. Who knew, it might attract some girls.

And if it did, he would tell them modestly, "This? This is an award that me and my friends won at the Fringe Con out in San Diego. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Wanna hear the story?"

Then as he started toward his lunch, his phone buzzed. He answered as he walked across the sunstruck asphalt toward the shaded front porch of the country-themed restaurant. "Hello?"

He listened to the voice as a bead of sweat crept down his forehead.

"Uh, yeah, I was Soos in that picture on Facebook. Good photo, wasn't—what? What did you say?"

He collapsed into a rocking chair on the restaurant porch as though overcome by heatstroke. "Who? Dude, wait a minute, let me wrap my head around this. No foolin'? You're really _him?_ _Alex_?"

The caller laughed and spoke again.

Brad actually stamped both feet in glee. He couldn't help laughing like a kindergartener. "Okay, man, I believe you! Oh, this! I mean! Oh, man! This—wow, this is—I'm a _huge_ fan, dude—this is such an—" he broke off, floundering for words.

Then he shook with delighted laughter as the right words came to him: "Such a gift! This is such a gift!" The voice on the phone joined him in laughing. Then it made a comment.

Brad nodded, though his caller couldn't possibly be aware of that, and said, "I know, I know! Series 1, Episode 4, am I right? No, of course I don't mind that you got my number from the Con staff! This is such a wonderful—What? No, no, I first met them at the Con. But weren't the others great? Wendy especially! Their names? Yeah, it was Diggory and Emma Palm, and get this, they're really twins, isn't that cool? And Willow Cambric, I mean, wasn't she absolutely perfect as Wendy? I know I'm just OK as Soos—aw, thanks, but I'm not nearly in their league—but I agree with you, our group deserved first place!"

The voice on the phone asked a question. Brad responded, "Oh, man, no, I'm so sorry. Dumb me, I didn't get their addresses or phone numbers, and we lost touch at the Con. They did say they were all from a little town named—you're gonna love this—Piedmont, Oregon! Me? No, I'm from Georgia. Cordele. 'Bout halfway between Macon and Valdosta, drivin' back now. Oh, you haven't? Well, it's about 145 miles nearly due south of Atlanta. Oh, sure I'll give you my address! Hey, maybe the other three will get in touch with me through my Facebook page. Check it out, I got lots of their photos there."

Brad recited his address and repeated it. The voice said something else to him, and he replied, "No, thank _you!_ You kiddin'? You're welcome to use them all! Hey, if you do connect with the others, would you please give them my phone number? Yeah, I'd like to get back in touch with them. 'Specially Willow. Man, she is so much like Wendy come to life! Yeah, yeah, I'm a nerd, I know, but seriously, man, everybody loves Wendy!"

The conversation lasted eleven minutes and nine seconds. It was—Brad sincerely believed—the best time of his entire life.

In days and weeks and even years to come, Brad looked back on that sizzling afternoon often and with a renewed happiness.

However, it was mixed, as memories so often are, with a little mellow regret. He found that he really missed the company of his three Con friends.

The only thing better than the phone call would have been getting in touch with Emma and Diggory and—especially—Willow.

Sadly, that never happened.

 _ **Gravity Falls: The morning of July 4th, near Gravity Falls High School.**_

Wendy was at the wheel of her Dodge Dart, complaining a little that it was so early. "Dudes, the parade won't even _start_ for another hour," she said.

Dipper, beside her in the front seat, said. "We know, we know, but we want to get a good spot."

"Yeah," Mabel said from the shotgun position. "We missed Summerween this year 'cause stupid school ran overtime after we were out 'cause of the winter floods, and we didn't get here until it was over. The Fourth of July Parade's the next best thing."

"Looks like the bands an' all are gathering here," Wendy said. "I'd better go find a parking spot off the route."

"No!" Dipper yelled. "I mean—no, pull in and park behind the school. I know where you can find a place."

"What's up, Dip?" Wendy asked suspiciously.

"You'll find out," Mabel said.

She drove slowly past the school marching band, which was tuning up. Or maybe it was playing "The Liberty Bell March," with them it was hard to tell. Then a group of Gravity Falls vets, all of them in full uniform. Deputy Durland stood in the parking lot next to a single slot set off with an orange cone. He moved the cone and waved them in, grinning.

So she parked. They got out and Dipper said, "Okay, now close your eyes." He grabbed her hand and led her around the corner of the building to a quiet spot. "Now open them."

She did. "Wow!"

"You're gonna drive in the parade," Dipper said. "Dogget will show you how."

"Dipper, man—dude, you fixed this up!"

"Well, yeah. I told the Admiral this would be the best reward he could give us. He agreed right away. He likes you."

"Oh, man, oh man—I've always wanted to do this!" Wendy hugged Dipper. "Dude, you're the best! Let's go!"

The next fifteen minutes were . . . interesting. But no automobiles were crushed and the high school was still standing when the lesson was over. Dipper and Mabel got to stand in the hatch, flags in hand. Dogget, though it was a tight fit, was behind Wendy ready to give emergency help should it be needed.

Dipper knew Wendy too well to believe she would need any. At the head of the parade line-up, Sheriff Blubs motioned them to take the lead. Wendy fired up the engine and they lurched, then rumbled forward. Their taking the lead in the parade was a safety precaution—it was good not to have to worry about squashing any marchers. Just behind them the band struck up a recognizable march.

And at another signal, Wendy made the left turn and drove an actual tank, the Admiral's surplus Army tank, to lead the parade along the route through the town.

"Smooth move, brobro," Mabel yelled in Dipper's ear over the roar of the engine and the clanking of the treads. "I foresee major smoochies in your near future!"

"Yeah, that'd be nice, but that's not really why I did it," Dipper said. "I did it 'cause Wendy's always there for us, Sis. I mean, she watches out for me, but especially I owe her 'cause she's there for you. Wendy's the second coolest girl I know."

She elbowed him hard in the ribs. " _Second coolest_? You got another one on the hook, you Romeo, you? Maybe a vampire? That'd be way cool!"

Dipper rubbed the incipient bruise. "Don't be all cray-cray!" He gave her an affectionate shove. "I'm talking about _you,_ silly!"

She looked at him with big, big eyes. "Awww, Dipper! Awkward sibling hug?"

"Awkward sibling hug."

Unfortunately, before they got to the pats, the tank jounced over a speedbump, they lost their footing and fell on top of Wendy and Dogget, the tank veered wildly, screaming spectators scattered, and for a few minutes the Fourth of July parade got a little too exciting.

But nobody was seriously injured, property damage was minimal, and afterward, everyone in town agreed that as Gravity Falls parades go, this was the most thrilling one ever.

(Almost) The End


	14. Chapter 14

**The Big Con**

 **Afterword:** _Seems a lot of folks think there's one little scene missing from the story. Okay, okay, here it is . . . ._

 _The lake, Gravity Falls, the night of the Fourth of July._

After the parade (and the clean-up), after the big barbecue and picnic hosted at the Mystery Shack by Soos and Melody (though Grunkle Stan served as master of ceremonies, and people were in such a good mood that they even laughed at some of his jokes), after playing games at the athletic field, after picnic dinners or family meals, right around dusk everyone went out to the lake for the last crowning Independence Day event: the fireworks show.

As they did every year, the locals crowded the swimming beach, sitting on lawn chairs or towels, eating ice creams, drinking sodas, and relaxing. A team of six experienced pros from Portland and hired just for the occasion crammed three boats with fireworks of every description—Roman candles, Catherine wheels, skyrockets, willows, chrysanthemums, barrages, comets, dragon's-egg cracklers, fire-fountains, go-getters, boomers, whizzers, all the rest. As they had every year, the team had already ferried the fireworks to Scuttlebutt Island and had set up for the grand show.

(A similar thing had taken place annually for as long as anyone in town could recall. Many years, after the show was over the whole team returned safe and alive to the docks.)

While the sky darkened, the crowd grew, laughed, played, and watched kids chasing each other with sparklers. Mabel tried to eat one and reported that it tasted "burny."

But Dipper . . . Dipper slipped away and walked down the beach, all the way past the ranger station, and to one of the long docks. No boats were moored there at the moment; the families who owned them had taken them out to watch the show from the water. Lights showed aboard them as they bobbed at anchor a hundred yards out on the lake. The last twilight just made the boats visible.

Dipper walked to the end of the empty dock and sat with his feet dangling. For a change he was all alone, all on his own. Even Mabel hadn't tagged along.

His thoughts seemed to him as dark as the sky above, and unrelieved even by the light of distant stars.

"Hey, man, what's shakin'?"

The voice startled Dipper. "Wendy!"

She came sauntering along, hands in pockets, and sat next to him. "Hey, man, thanks for the opportunity today."

"Aw, you're welcome." He kicked his legs, then stopped. _That's childish._ "Uh—how, how did you know I was here?"

"I have like mental radar, dude. I focused in on you and it led me here." She laughed. "Plus, I saw you walkin' all by yourself along the edge of the water and I followed you. You looked kinda down, man. What's the prob?"

 _Full night had fallen. Across the black expanse of water, the fireworks began with two arcing streaks of red etched on the dark face of night. They gracefully bent and then burst into brilliant green streamers. A second later the booms reached the shore. Off on the swimming beach, people began to cheer._

Dipper sighed. "Oh, I don't know what's the matter with me. Stuff's just bugging me. I feel guilty because I got us all into danger when I thought I could call and control a ghost. Instead it grabbed us, dragged in Mabel, and me, and even you off into the netherworld or someplace—and it was my fault. I didn't have any right to risk your lives."

 _Silver rockets in the distance spangled the sky._

Wendy said, "No sweat, dude. We got out of it, didn't we? We make a great team. Hey, believe me, there were even times when I enjoyed it."

 _More booms, followed a few seconds later by bombs bursting in air, gold and silver, green and red, vibrant blue. In their light, drifts of pale gray smoke floated like streamers._

Watching the fireworks, Dipper went on, "And then . . . the whole thing about that weird other world blows my mind. If what we did last summer's a cartoon show over there—and if it's as accurate as it obviously is—what does that make us? Are we a real world, or are we imaginary? Do we exist just 'cause some people in another reality dreamed us up and other people like us? Or are we the real thing and is the other place imaginary, or are we both real and did the people who made that show somehow tune in on our lives? What's real and what's not real?"

"Wow. Deep, man." She punched him on the shoulder.

"Ow!"

 _Dozens more rockets, and this time brilliant sparks whirled in a storm of light, crackling and popping._

Wendy chuckled. "Felt real, didn't it?"

"Yeah," he said, rubbing his arm.

 _Streams of light streaked up. Ovals of green and red burst from them and expanded, lassoing the stars._

After a few moments of watching the display, Wendy said, "Come on, Dip. Somethin' else is troubling you. That's not all. C'mon, man, tell me. We're friends, remember?"

 _Deep booms, then fountains of jetting colors neoned the darkness. Hisses and pops and bangs echoed off the bluffs around the lake._

Dipper bit his lip. "Yeah, something else. Well . . . that girl. The one dressed up sort of like Pacifica. I mean, she grabbed me when they were gonna take the picture and before I knew it, she was kissing me right on the lips!"

"Wasn't your fault."

 _A rocket somehow went wrong, rainbowed out and down to the water and drowned itself with a long hiss._

Dipper's sigh echoed the failed rocket. "No, but I kinda hoped my first kiss . . . first real kiss, you know what I mean . . . I wanted . . . ah, forget it."

 _Now the mortars flung whole packs of firecrackers into the sky to explode with flashes and bangs._

Teasingly, Wendy said, "Mabel told me Mermando was your first kiss."

"That didn't count! I was your assistant lifeguard, and that was reverse mouth-to-mouth resuscitation!"

" _America the Beautiful" began to play, the orchestral music coming from speakers around the swimming beach. Fireworks were choreographed to it, underlining the lyrics. Purple mountain majesties actually appeared in the sky, one peak behind another and another. . . ._

Wendy said, "Good point, dude. So . . . if that kiss is off the books, why does the other one count? Dude, it wasn't really Pacifica. And it wasn't really _you_. I mean, you weren't in your real body, were you? And you didn't mean for it to happen."

"Well, yeah . . . but . . .I wanted—I can't explain. Oh, it's kid stuff. It's 'cause I'm so young."

"I told you once you were pretty mature for your age, remember? Dipper, look at me. Look at me, man."

 _The song was coming to its end. Sea to shining sea—a brilliant waving scatter of blue and silver, one to the east, the other to the west—_

Dipper saw in the light of the rockets Wendy's face. She leaned over. She was smiling. He felt her lips warm and soft on his—

He caught his breath and closed his eyes—

 _And even with them closed, he saw the whole sky, horizon to horizon, ablaze with the most fantastic fireworks he could even imagine._

(Really) The End


End file.
